Tool: Awesome Map Editor (AME)

Sierraffinity · Mar 28, 2016

Please note that Awesome Map Editor is no longer being worked on. You can still download and compile the source but it does not actually save anything to the ROM.
Please stop PMing me about this for the love of god

Awesome Map Editor

because we deserve something better than A-Map

So as you're all probably well aware, Advance-Map, the most prolific Pokémon game map editor available, is buggy, incorrect in its implementations, not open source, and not cross-platform. This project aims to change that by building a clone of Advance-Map in Qt using C++ that can run on a wide range of systems. Thanks to Qt's excellent cross-platform compatibility, each platform has a native app that works exactly as you'd expect any other app to work.

Features:

The idea is to replicate all of A-Map's features and fix or improve them first and foremost. After that will come new features and other cool stuff, like support for plugins. At the moment, AME can:

Load ROMs
Display maps
Display map connections
Display entities (previously called events)
Show entity data
Show wild Pokémon data
Show header information

Download:

No binaries have been released yet but you can download the source.
Source code: https://github.com/Diegoisawesome/AwesomeMapEditor

Credits:

Diegoisawesome - UI/backend developer
Pokedude - Backend developer

PokéMew1 · Mar 29, 2016

This is great! I think the best part of this project is that it's aimed to be a clone of A-Map, so we'll all be familiar with the tool right from the start. (only here, the flaws are fixed!) I'll definitely stick around to watch this tool progress. :)

chrunch · Mar 30, 2016

Looks great! Glad to see another promising map editor out there, although at this point I think I'd be happy with anything that's not A-map.

Reposting my suggestion from the other map editor because it appears to have died:

Here's an idea: let us assign a default movement permission value to tiles. So for example, whenever you place down some grass, the movement permission would always be C. When you place a tree, those tiles will always be 1. Would save a lot of time not having to add movement permissions whenever you edit a map and would basically eliminate movement permission errors.

thedarkdragon11 · Mar 30, 2016

This is nice!

Yvtq8K3n · Mar 30, 2016

Man i love everything u do, that xse tutorial, now this, i wonder what will be next. Keep the good work. Thanks for making it open source, i will for sure take a look.

Spherical Ice · Mar 30, 2016

Are you looking for help with this?

The project looks really promising and actually looks like something I could possibly contribute to, so if you have anything you don't look forward to implementing or something I could help out, if you'd like.

BluRose · Mar 30, 2016

chrunch said:
Looks great! Glad to see another promising map editor out there, although at this point I think I'd be happy with anything that's not A-map.

Reposting my suggestion from the other map editor because it appears to have died:

I agree with this, but one should also make it editable anyways because of movement permissions that are below/above 0xC (0x4, 0x8, 0x10, to just throw out the passible ones).

tzujm33 · Mar 30, 2016

I had some ideas for the other -sadly cancelled- editor which you may can implement.

1. A Filter/Search function for the wild Pokemon editor (most useful would be filtering by type and dex number, but also useful could be filter by bst and stage of evolution)

2. Another feature would be the possibility to view neighbouring maps in the map header when needed. This would be helpful to not always having to jump between maps to know if the borders were mapped correctly.

3. I would like to see the possibility to edit multible blocks at once in the block editor.

4. When enlarging a map in amap it always enlarges it to the rigth and bottom. It would be useful to have the possibility to decide in which of the 4 directions the map should be enlarged.

I really appreciate your effort, thx for spending your time working on this!

Crizzle · Mar 30, 2016

I think this will kill A-Map. (Or at least I hope. I'd love to use something else.)

And that's a good thing. I'm less experienced than most but the more I use and find out about A-Map, the more flawed it seems to be.

Looking forward to experiencing more of your awesomeness, Diego. Good luck.

esperance · Mar 30, 2016

It definitely looks like you're off to a good start.

And I'll second Spherical Ice -- if you're looking for help I'd love to contribute.

thedarkdragon11 · Mar 30, 2016

I hope you will consider some of these features from the discontinued project:

Triple-layer hack
Dynamic Pokémon reading
World map editing
Expandable map names
Expandable flying positions

pokefreak890 · Mar 30, 2016

This is awesome but I would love to see the ability to add more maps in a rom without replacing as A-map version of it wasn't completed and never worked when I tried it

Jaizu · Mar 30, 2016

Stupid question; is this going to work in more SOs than Windows?

Sierraffinity · Mar 30, 2016

PokéMew said:
This is great! I think the best part of this project is that it's aimed to be a clone of A-Map, so we'll all be familiar with the tool right from the start. (only here, the flaws are fixed!) I'll definitely stick around to watch this tool progress. :)

Awesome!

chrunch said:
Looks great! Glad to see another promising map editor out there, although at this point I think I'd be happy with anything that's not A-map.

Reposting my suggestion from the other map editor because it appears to have died:

Here's an idea: let us assign a default movement permission value to tiles. So for example, whenever you place down some grass, the movement permission would always be C. When you place a tree, those tiles will always be 1. Would save a lot of time not having to add movement permissions whenever you edit a map and would basically eliminate movement permission errors.

Click to expand...

I might give the option of default movement permission application, with the ability to toggle them on and off but I'm not sure how much I like that idea. I'm not a huge fan of assigning specific hacks to external configuration files since if you lose the config file at some point or something else happens, then all your configurations for that ROM have been lost. I'd like to find some way to include all the new data I'd need within the ROM itself but I have yet to see how I'd handle that.

thedarkdragon11 said:
This is nice!

Thanks!

Yvtq8K3n said:
Man i love everything u do, that xse tutorial, now this, i wonder what will be next. Keep the good work. Thanks for making it open source, i will for sure take a look.

Thank you!

Spherical Ice said:
Are you looking for help with this?

The project looks really promising and actually looks like something I could possibly contribute to, so if you have anything you don't look forward to implementing or something I could help out, if you'd like.

Yeah, I'll definitely need some help with this. Right now the reimplementation into WPF is killing me as I'm missing some crucial components (such as a hex editor widget and a better NumberUpDown widget) so if there are any WPF experts I'd love to get some help with that section.

tzujm33 said:
I had some ideas for the other -sadly cancelled- editor which you may can implement.

1. A Filter/Search function for the wild Pokemon editor (most useful would be filtering by type and dex number, but also useful could be filter by bst and stage of evolution) This could be implemented, but what usage case do you see this in? Maybe I just am not getting what exactly you mean.

2. Another feature would be the possibility to view neighbouring maps in the map header when needed. This would be helpful to not always having to jump between maps to know if the borders were mapped correctly. Definitely, but how about greyed out in the actual mapping view itself? :D

3. I would like to see the possibility to edit multible blocks at once in the block editor. Hmm...I don't quite see how useful that could be. Could you elaborate on possible uses?

4. When enlarging a map in amap it always enlarges it to the rigth and bottom. It would be useful to have the possibility to decide in which of the 4 directions the map should be enlarged. I'm thinking of making enlargement really intuitive, letting you actually drag out the boundaries of the map in whatever direction you desire in order to expand it.

I really appreciate your effort, thx for spending your time working on this!

Responses in bold.

Crizzle said:
I think this will kill A-Map. (Or at least I hope. I'd love to use something else.)

And that's a good thing. I'm less experienced than most but the more I use and find out about A-Map, the more flawed it seems to be.

Looking forward to experiencing more of your awesomeness, Diego. Good luck.

Yeah, A-Map's got a lot of issues, and nobody can fix them as it's closed source. Hopefully this will fix that!

Lostelle said:
It definitely looks like you're off to a good start.

And I'll second Spherical Ice -- if you're looking for help I'd love to contribute.

Knowledge of WPF would be most immediately useful to me right now but I'm sure you'll be able to help in the future if you're not too well versed.

Dark Zeta said:
Looks good. Will offer any help I can. I'd be more than happy to test this across all major OS's since I have access to them already.

That won't be necessary yet as I haven't built the other OS UIs. Once that comes then I'd really appreciate the help with making their UIs.

thedarkdragon11 said:
I hope you will consider some of these features from the discontinued project:

Triple-layer hack Definitely.

Dynamic Pokémon reading What do you mean by that?

World map editing Yes.

Expandable map names Yup.

Expandable flying positions Uh-huh.

Responses in bold.

pokefreak890 said:
This is awesome but I would love to see the ability to add more maps in a rom without replacing as A-map version of it wasn't completed and never worked when I tried it

I'll add this in but I'd recommend against it in general; if you're smart about reusing maps, most people shouldn't have to ever insert entirely new ones.

Jaizu said:
Stupid question; is this going to work in more SOs than Windows?

Yup! Right now Mac (MonoMac) and Linux (GTK#) are planned. Do you have any more OSs you can think of that should support this?

thedarkdragon11 · Mar 30, 2016

diegoisawesome said:
Awesome!

I might give the option of default movement permission application, with the ability to toggle them on and off but I'm not sure how much I like that idea. I'm not a huge fan of assigning specific hacks to external configuration files since if you lose the config file at some point or something else happens, then all your configurations for that ROM have been lost. I'd like to find some way to include all the new data I'd need within the ROM itself but I have yet to see how I'd handle that.

Thanks!

Thank you!

Yeah, I'll definitely need some help with this. Right now the reimplementation into WPF is killing me as I'm missing some crucial components (such as a hex editor widget and a better NumberUpDown widget) so if there are any WPF experts I'd love to get some help with that section.

Responses in bold.

Yeah, A-Map's got a lot of issues, and nobody can fix them as it's closed source. Hopefully this will fix that!

Knowledge of WPF would be most immediately useful to me right now but I'm sure you'll be able to help in the future if you're not too well versed.

That won't be necessary yet as I haven't built the other OS UIs. Once that comes then I'd really appreciate the help with making their UIs.

Responses in bold.

I'll add this in but I'd recommend against it in general; if you're smart about reusing maps, most people shouldn't have to ever insert entirely new ones.

Yup! Right now Mac (MonoMac) and Linux (GTK#) are planned. Do you have any more OSs you can think of that should support this?

What I mean about the Dynamic Pokémon Reading is that it will have the capability to automatically read expanded Pokémon data... Say for instance, used with 721 patches...

I think adding new maps would be great... Especially with hacks that has 3-4 regions... That can work well with the expanded map names and usage of the map name #s 0-57...

slawter666 · Mar 31, 2016

It's great to see a drive for a new map editor, it will definitely be useful.

As a suggestion could we get a preview mode, where basically a 240x160 rectangle shows the map and the rest is blacked out, and using the arrow keys we can move that rectangle one tile at a time, akin to the overworld within the pokémon games. This will really help get a feeling for the scale of the maps as a map that can look an average size on a monitor can turn out massive ingame simply due to the different screen sizes.

Also someone mentioned editing multiple blocks at a time, this world be beneficial for those importing large tiles such as buildings, perhaps allowing the top layer of multiple blocks to be editted at the same time so the bottom generic scenery layer can be added. Just to speed things up.

Also will the implementation of the triple-layer hack be changed at all. I used it a year or so back with MEH and, while I'll need to recheck to be certain, it didn't seem to work if the bottom layer was on the first tileset (it would just appear black).

Anyway, thank you for endeavouring to do such a project, I'm sure many will use it once completed.

BLAx501! · Mar 31, 2016

There are two features from ~Pokedude's cancelled project that would be sick to have here: Undo/Redo function and this one: http://www.pokecommunity.com/showpost.php?p=9174219&postcount=51

Nice to hear that after the cancelled project you have your own one :p

_JackHood · Mar 31, 2016

Does this tool support Gen 4-6 Pokemon, because I have those Pokemon in an Emerald Rom Hack that I'm making. However, I am using advance map, which does not support gen 4-6 Pokemon. I have been looking for a long time for a map editor tool like advance map that supports gen 4-6 Pokemon. Please let me know as soon as possible if this tool does support gen 4-6 on gba, or may in the future. Thank you.

Sierraffinity · Apr 1, 2016

thedarkdragon11 said:
What I mean about the Dynamic Pokémon Reading is that it will have the capability to automatically read expanded Pokémon data... Say for instance, used with 721 patches...

I think adding new maps would be great... Especially with hacks that has 3-4 regions... That can work well with the expanded map names and usage of the map name #s 0-57...

Oh yeah, that's a feature that will naturally come about from the implementation. And I see your point about the map names.

slawter666 said:
It's great to see a drive for a new map editor, it will definitely be useful.

As a suggestion could we get a preview mode, where basically a 240x160 rectangle shows the map and the rest is blacked out, and using the arrow keys we can move that rectangle one tile at a time, akin to the overworld within the pokémon games. This will really help get a feeling for the scale of the maps as a map that can look an average size on a monitor can turn out massive ingame simply due to the different screen sizes.

Also someone mentioned editing multiple blocks at a time, this world be beneficial for those importing large tiles such as buildings, perhaps allowing the top layer of multiple blocks to be editted at the same time so the bottom generic scenery layer can be added. Just to speed things up.

Also will the implementation of the triple-layer hack be changed at all. I used it a year or so back with MEH and, while I'll need to recheck to be certain, it didn't seem to work if the bottom layer was on the first tileset (it would just appear black).

Anyway, thank you for endeavouring to do such a project, I'm sure many will use it once completed.

The preview mode idea is interesting... I might see about doing that, not sure how it would work in the editor though considering WPF is a fickle beast. And thanks, I now see the usage case for editing multiple blocks at a time, I'll definitely add that. The triple layer tile implementation will be my own by default but will support Shiny Quagsire's method too if you choose it.

BLAx501! said:
There are two features from ~Pokedude's cancelled project that would be sick to have here: Undo/Redo function and this one: http://www.pokecommunity.com/showpost.php?p=9174219&postcount=51

Nice to hear that after the cancelled project you have your own one :p

Undo/Redo is definitely a huge priority (and something sorely lacking from A-Map), and the second feature is already partially implemented/planned to be implemented.

_JackHood said:
Does this tool support Gen 4-6 Pokemon, because I have those Pokemon in an Emerald Rom Hack that I'm making. However, I am using advance map, which does not support gen 4-6 Pokemon. I have been looking for a long time for a map editor tool like advance map that supports gen 4-6 Pokemon. Please let me know as soon as possible if this tool does support gen 4-6 on gba, or may in the future. Thank you.

Yeah, that will just happen naturally based on the way I read the data.

jirachiwishmaker · Apr 1, 2016

Extremely amazing! Could you implement a new day and night system which has the following feature: the lamppost, the windows and the doors will light up at night?

Tool: Awesome Map Editor (AME)

More options

Sierraffinity

Desperately trying to retire from ROM hacking

Awesome Map Editor

Features:

Download:

Credits:

PokéMew1

Pokémon Fuchsia

chrunch

thedarkdragon11

New World Pirate

Yvtq8K3n

muhaha

Spherical Ice

BluRose

blu rass

tzujm33

Crizzle

Legend

esperance

thedarkdragon11

New World Pirate

pokefreak890

The One that will make everything great

Jaizu

Average rom hacker

Sierraffinity

Desperately trying to retire from ROM hacking

thedarkdragon11

New World Pirate

slawter666

BLAx501!

Pokemon Flux

_JackHood

Sierraffinity

Desperately trying to retire from ROM hacking

jirachiwishmaker