[Pokecrystal] [Tool] Polished Map 4.7.1 and 2.7.1++: a pokecrystal and pokered map editor

[Rangi]

Polished Map is a map editor for the pokecrystal or pokered disassembly projects. It was inspired by the now-outdated crowdmap and the binary hack tool Advance Map.

Download:

Download version 4.7.1 on GitHub and follow the instructions to install it.

Features:

Polished Map can open maps from pokecrystal, pokered, and various hacks using those bases, including Polished Crystal v2, Red++ v3, Orange, and Prism. All these projects have only slight differences in their file locations and formats, which is why they're all compatible.

Polished Map can edit blocks, tiles, roofs, collision data, color palettes, and events (NPCs, warps, signs, etc). It cannot view map connections.

A few tips:

• Before you open a project, set the Options menu. pokered needs "Monochrome" to be checked; hacks like Orange need "256 Tiles".
• Options→Tile Priority is checked for projects where you can use priority tiles, which appear over sprites. This tutorial explains how to enable tile priority.
• Options→256 Tiles is checked for projects where you can use 256 tiles in a tileset. (pokecrystal skips tiles $60 to $7F and does not use tiles $E0 to $FF.) This tutorial explains how to extend tilesets.
• Polished Map does not update the .asm files that define a map's size and tileset; you have to do that if you change those. For example, pokecrystal defines the width and height in constants/map_constants.asm and the tileset in data/maps/maps.asm. You can also put the size and tileset in the filename, e.g. NewBarkTown.10x9.johto.blk for a 10x9 map with the johto tileset.
• Right-click a block in the sidebar, or an event on the map, to open a dialog for editing them.
• Middle-click and drag to scroll the sidebar or the map.
• Shift+click a warp event to open the map that it warps to.
• Read the Help file and the GitHub docs for more details, including mouse-controlled features that might be harder to discover than menu items and toolbar buttons.
• If you are using Windows, right-click install.bat and click "Run as Administrator". This will install Polished Map to your account's AppData folder and place a shortcut on your Desktop. You will also be able to double-click a .blk file to open it in Polished Map.
• If you've made changes to your project that make it incompatible with Polished Map, you can probably edit config.h and config.cpp to add support for custom file locations.

Screenshots:

Spoiler:

 

[Rangi]

Polished Map++ is for pokecrystal projects that have added attributes.bin files. If you're working with regular pokecrystal or pokered, don't use ++.

Download:

Download version 2.7.1++ on GitHub and follow the instructions to install it.

Features:

Polished Map already has optional support for expanding the tileset from 192 to 255 tiles, and PRIORITY colors for tiles, allowing them to appear over sprites.

But there's a more advanced technique to assign per-block attributes. The same tile can be GRAY in one block, BROWN in another, and PRIORITY_BROWN in a third. This also lets you use the X and Y flip attributes, just like mapping in Gen 3.

Polished Map++ supports this. Instead of *_palette_map.asm files, it reads *_attributes.bin files. This feature was designed for Polished Crystal v3 and Red++ v4, but other hacks like Coral and Ancient Ruby are already using it to create more detailed maps.

A few tips:

• Start with a pokecrystal project, then follow the tutorials to expand tilesets and assign per-block attributes. Otherwise Polished Map++ won't work with your hack.
• Options→512 Tiles is checked for projects where you can use even more than 256 tiles in a tileset, up to the hardware limit of 512. However, pokecrystal already uses the VRAM areas that this checkbox enables (tile IDs $80-FF in banks 0 and 1), for loading text and NPC sprite graphics. But if your hack loads tiles for maps in that area, this option lets you use them.
• Polished Map++ can read .blk or .ablk files. So you can name all your maps .ablk, and work side-by-side with a copy of Polished Map on a standard pokecrystal project. They won't interfere with each others' saved settings or file associations.

Screenshots:

Spoiler:

 

[Rangi]

Version 4.4.3 and 2.4.3++ are out! The only new feature is support for "keyitemball_event" in Polished Crystal, but they also fix some memory leaks, so I recommend updating.

 

[Rangi]

It's the first release of 2020: version 4.4.4 and 2.4.4++! Event coordinates are fixed to range from -6 to 249, so very wide or tall maps like RBY Route 23 will still work. It also fixes a bug with the Game Boy Screen overlay. And if you want to use polishedmap.exe as a portable app instead of installing it to Windows' AppData folder, now it will detect a local polishedmap.prefs or Polished Map.prefs file.

 

[Rangi]

Polished Map 4.5.0 and 2.5.0++ are out! It's a minor update for regular Polished Map, but for Polished Map++, it now supports up to the GBC hardware limit of 512 tiles.

The Polished Crystal beta 3.0 engine lets you use 384 of those 512 (the other 128 are for text graphics), which Pokémon Coral is already taking advantage of:

 

[Rangi]

Versions 4.5.1 and 2.5.1++ are released!

Polished Map 4.5.1 supports some recent reorganizations to pokered.

Both of them now export all palettes at once, not one at a time. They also support .2bpp tilesets (in case you don't have a .png or .2bpp.lz) and .2bpp.lz roof graphics (in case you added compression for those).

 

[Rangi]

Versions 4.5.2 and 2.5.2++ are released!

They now have multi-line fields for long event text:

They also support custom evening colors:

 

[silogram42424]

Is there going to be any way to run this on mac? obviously doing things on mac is in general a pain; but I got by for my fire emblem hacks and was really looking forward to hacking crystal...

Thank you for creating this amazing tool though.

 

[Rangi]

Is there going to be any way to run this on mac? obviously doing things on mac is in general a pain; but I got by for my fire emblem hacks and was really looking forward to hacking crystal...

Thank you for creating this amazing tool though.

For now you'll have to run the Windows or Linux versions via Wine, Xquartz, Parallels, or some other such solution. macOS support is planned, but I don't actually own a Mac, and it will take time to get working.

 

[silogram42424]

Got it! I'm setting it up in Parallels right now. When I try to 'Run As Administrator' install.bat I get an error: "cmd does not support unc path as current directories." Any idea on a fix?

Thanks so much for your help :D

EDIT: I got it to work in Parallels. Woohoo!

 

[Rangi]

For Friday the 13th, here are Polished Map 4.5.3 and 2.5.3++.

The most obvious new feature is the Brushed Metal theme. There are also some compatibility updates for pokered/pokeyellow and pokegold-spaceworld, some more mouse shortcuts to quickly design blocks, and a few other updates described in the changelog.

One update that was necessary for pokegold-spaceworld support, and useful for hack projects like Red++ 4, is the two-part and three-part tileset support. If your tileset graphic is named something like "specific.common.png", then Polished Map(++) will load the "common.png" graphic before the "specific.common.png" one. All the other files are expected to just have a single name, like "specific_metatiles.bin". Furthermore, if it's named like "specific.more1,more2.png", then Polished Map(++) will load "more1.png", then "specific.more1,more2.png", and then "more2.png". (It can't load more than three files this way.)

Here's an example: "tileset_00.common.png" loaded the two-row "common.png" graphic before its own four rows.

 

[Rangi]

Polished Map 4.5.4 and 2.5.4++ is just a bugfix release so that creating a new map doesn't crash. It also adds a one-time warning when you first save a tileset with more than 128 blocks, since a pokecrystal bug needs fixing to allow that.

 

[Rangi]

Polished Map 4.6.0 (and Polished Map++ 2.6.0) are released! New features include support for the Flash darkness palette; pasting multiple tile graphics at once in the tileset editor; trimming unused blank tiles when saving a tileset; remembering if the window is full-screen or maximized; and some other UI tweaks and bugfixes. It also updates the FLTK window library to 1.3.6.

 

[Rangi]

Polished Map 4.7.0 and 2.7.0++ are released! They've had various bug fixes and improvements to the UI; see the release notes for details. Some that stand out:

• The palette editor has sliders for the three colors, and a hex input for converting between 5-bit GBC colors and 8-bit #RRGGBB colors. Remember, this can be opened with Ctrl+Shift+L even without opening a map first.

• If you try to Save your changes, but one of the files was already modified by some other program (like maybe you moved an event in Polished Map, but also made changes to the script in Notepad), then you'll be warned about the conflicting edits.

• View→Transparent (F10) makes the window transparent. Potentially useful for seeing an image underneath the window and designing your map on top of it.

 

[Rangi]

Polished Map 4.7.1 and 2.7.1++ are released! The main addition is a feature I realized would be useful while porting tilesets from pokered to pokecrystal. You can press Alt+1 through Alt+8 to quickly assign a color to the current tile, instead of clicking the dropdown and then clicking the right color. This release also improves compatibility with international characters in filenames.

 

[Davy Gravy]

Question: Can I load my file to make maps? I want to take a look at Pokemon Red's maps, and I checked the Monochrome at the Options button. I tried loading it, didn't work...

 

[Lunos]

Question: Can I load my file to make maps? I want to take a look at Pokemon Red's maps, and I checked the Monochrome at the Options button. I tried loading it, didn't work...

Naturally, the program loads files, so yes, you can load your file, assuming you're not talking about a ROM file.
Polished Map opens disassembly related files, so to open one of Pokémon Red's maps, you must choose the .blk file of said map, located in a Pokered project's data/maps folder.

 

[Gold_n_Silver]

So yeah... Quick question. I couldn't build the software by myself so is there a exe version of it? I will be eternally grateful if someone built it.

 

[Lunos]

So yeah... Quick question. I couldn't build the software by myself so is there a exe version of it? I will be eternally grateful if someone built it.

My dude, the precompiled builds are linked right below "Download" in the main post.
https://github.com/Rangi42/polished-map/releases

 

[Hugo_Cool]

My bros. Help me out. Does using this tool helps expanding pokecrystal map? I.E. I would like to had safari zone, mewtwo's hideout and other locations back. I ask this question because I know the original gen 2 games were out of tiles space.
Best regards