Phlegm, GM Level Editor

custom binary format. I included the specification in the distribution.

I looked at it now and it looks like you did more than just saving index and coordinates of tiles and objects to a random file and just calling that a .lev .

Ah, I think I got it. GM shows functions for text files (which I used) and binary files.
I should probably have gone with binary files, as text files aren't very efficient when it comes to space I think.

Thanks.

Probably. More space is wasted on small numbers because I use a lot of 32-bit integers, but I don't have overhead for delimiters. Actually the most space is wasted on any strings I store because those are all fixed length at either 32 or 64 bytes. But I just love binary formats (:

Yeah, my file format is intended to be very modular. Tiles are mostly just coordinates and indexes, but objects also include a lot of extra variable data, and there's other data blocks for frame information, etc. One of the main benefits to the current design is it should be fairly easy to make the level files forwards- and backwards-compatible, hence some of the extra meta-data in the head of each block.

This post has been edited by Retriever II on Mar 25 2008, 12:54 PM

Oh I see.
So yea, in this moment I'm trying to convert my text format to a binary. Always open for new stuff, and according to calculations, I can save at least half of the space I'm wasting now. Given that a ascii symbol always has two bytes, i.e. 256x256 possibilities, as I have seen that the last ascii symbol is around 40000 or so...
Probably it would work with text format too, but unfortunately GM can't interprete any symbol above 256, so I need to write two asciis to get to the same range, meaning 4 bytes. With binary, I could use only two bytes for the same range so yea.

Anyway, this topic will hear from me when I've done it, thanks for your help again, Sir.

If your ASCII is two bytes, it's not ASCII Sounds like UTF-16.

As said, I'm not sure about the size of it and I just said ascii because... yea, first thing that came to my mind describing it, but yea either it's not two bytes or it's not ascii, in any case going to binary will be the best choice I think =)

Bump!

Phlegm has evolved.
It now uses binary format instead of text.
The change saves around 1/3 of the space, but this is mostly due to other modifications like taking out unnecessary symbols and stuff, but what is good is, that this is loading faster, and you can't read it when loading in Editor or WordPad.

Thank you RII, for giving me this idea, because this means I can also give out an engine test of gnome 2.0 soon. Probably also of Phlegm.

I'm interested to see how it's come along, even if I don't use Game Maker.

It looks really good.
I probrably woulden't use it since i'm not sure it's worth the trouble, but i'll probrably mess around with it.
Also, how is it pronouned? I say it Fel-Jum.

I say flem like the crud in your throat.

It's 'flem', which is rather odd imo. But this looks promising.

Clicky
I only know the word in the meaning for something slimy, and I think I picked it because slime works nice with gnomes...

Guinea, When we can see a test executable?

I might take a random open source engine and implement it there so people can see how it works.
But it's still not yet ready to be seen or used by public.

Neither was mine, but I did get some useful feedback on it. Well, I did in September. Note lately ):

This looks really pretty good. I can't wait to try it out.

BEAVER DAM! Great Idea.

This really looks great.

Can't wait to test it out.

True that, but if I released it the way it is in this moment, people would post comments like "you can't do this and that" which I already know and I don't think that's useful.
I'd rather add a few more things so people can really give useful comments.

What I want to add before release so you have a vague idea of when you can get to test Phlegm with an open-source engine:
- Move tiles and objects that are already placed
- Fix some stuff with the backgrounds
- View only a certain layer (of tiles, or objects)
- Copy only the viewed layer

I think that's the most important for now..
If that's done, you guys can test it if you dare.

This looks really interesting. Keep up the good work