important question

Is there a possibility of the level editor being released?  Nifflas mentioned it before, stating that it was very difficult to use, but that was a long time ago.

I am not talking about making a new editor or improving the existing editor in any way; that would be a huge amount of work and is probably in nobody's best interest.  I'm just asking if it might be released.

Download
Direct link to Windows installer for 0.7.1, which is apparently required

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Roguelike (it's much too difficult to write my own description of the genre)

Once you know what a roguelike game is, the important things to know about Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup are:
- Level grinding is outright impossible throughout most or all of the game for most characters.  When it is possible, it's not very useful.
- The game is way easier to learn than most roguelikes, and great effort has been put into making the interface intuitive and reducing reliance on spoilers.
- Game balance is also emphasized, so there are very few occasions where something is either useless or brokenly overpowered (and you can expect them to be fixed if they are).
- There are very few "best" items, very few guaranteed items, and no wishing for specific items.  As such, you shouldn't ever expect (or try to) play the same way twice.
- There are many different dungeon branches, most of which have their own monster sets and level generation algorithms.  As such, there is a lot of variety and the game is less linear than most roguelikes.
- There are many vaults.  In the context of Crawl (and some other roguelikes), a vault is a pre-designed map which ranges in size from a tiny portion of a dungeon level to an entire dungeon level.  They usually contain items, monsters, interesting features, or all three.  I have made many of these, and most are included in the game.
- The game is under active, open development and is frequently updated.
- As you may have inferred from the previous points, Crawl is basically the opposite of NetHack.

Required screenshot:

(see the download page for screenshots of the tiles version, but be aware they're out of date and the game is significantly nicer-looking now)

I get a messageless crash whenever I attempt to create a new world or load an existing one.  This happens both with custom level support and without, regardless of the simulated Windows version.
The main game works perfectly, including custom levels, as long as I override msvpc60.dll with a native one (same thing required for Knytt Stories).
Anyone who helps me fix this gets one and a half cookies and maybe possibly a chunk of a FiNCK tileset.  I'm particularily eager to make custom levels for this game as it seems the main world hasn't really touched on the puzzle possibilities.

The Wine debug console spits this out upon starting Editor.exe (same thing for almost everything else so I doubt it's a problem, especially since these are just fixmes):
fixme:dsalsa:IDsDriverBufferImpl_SetVolumePan (0x1620c0,0x161fe0): stub
fixme:dsalsa:IDsDriverBufferImpl_SetVolumePan (0x1620c0,0x161fe0): stub
fixme:heap:RtlCompactHeap (0x110000, 0x0) stub
fixme:win:LockWindowUpdate (0x10064), partial stub!
fixme:win:LockWindowUpdate ((nil)), partial stub!
And upon the crash, all this crap:

Something's telling me this is a problem with one or more of the MFX extensions.

So, this topic is really more to showcase the Spring engine than this particular game, but that would probably be in violation of the rules.  The Spring engine is a free, open-source engine for RTS games, and it is, in a word, awesome; little more needs to be said about it.

Spring: 1944 is a game based on World War II, with an emphasis on accuracy to the time period.  It's great fun to play and should work even on low-performance computers.  Like all Spring games, it will run on Windows and Linux and has online multiplayer.  If anyone here would like to play against me, do let me know!  (I suck at the game, though  )
The game has Bloodless Carnage, so it's pretty safe to play in front of parents/kids/whatever.

I am not providing DIRECT download links because both the game and the Spring engine are constantly updated.


Download Spring: 1944
Download the Spring engine - you need to do this first, unless you use the Spring: 1944 installer, which also installs the engine.  (Allegedly; I haven't done it myself, being a Linux user.)

Pretty much what the title says.  The music available on ni2.se and on niffpage.greywool.com is in MP3 or sometimes OGG format, with only the OHC's in IT format.  But I know that a large portion of this music was tracked, and I want it in its original format.  Not so that I can rip Nifflas off or anything (I promise I will leave your samples alone!) - it's just that I would rather have the small, perfect-quality IT/XM/whatever than a large, questionable-quality MP3.

I think this has been asked before somewhere, but I can't find it, so...

Or Biomenace, or BioMenace, or whatever suits your needs best.

Get the game here.  Direct download link.

-It's a platformer!
-You have a mullet and an assault rifle!
-Fight both mutants and robots at the same time!
-Marvel at Jim Norwood's ability to actually draw things at a reasonable scale!
-Possibly original music by Bobert Prince!
-A "Hard" mode that's actually hard!
-Discontinued and thus released as freeware!
-Weepy, albeit short, "good old days" monologue included!  (Though it turned out to be kind of prophetic, referring to indie games.)

In all seriousness, this is in my opinion a great game, which I've been playing and replaying since before anyone used Windows.  I decided to post it here only now.  Those wondering how to play it without actually installing DOS should try DOSBox.

Required but honestly useless screenshots, lazily taken from the game page:

Too long have we suffered from really, really bad tilesets.  Too long have we suffered from questions about transparency.  It is time to take action.

What?
This is a tutorial for drawing Knytt Stories tilesets in the style of those present in, for example, The Machine and A Strange Dream.  And the original Knytt, for that matter.  It is also a tutorial for how to make a tileset work in the editor in the first place.

Why?
I'm bored and I want to see more and better custom tilesets, though the impact of this post may not be as significant as I hope for it to be.

When?
Right now.

Where?
Okay, this isn't clever anymore.  We'll go on with it, then.





First of all, you will want to obtain a good image editing program.  If you decide to ignore this and use MS Paint, I hate you.  Sorry.  This tutorial will use GIMP, but none of it is specific to GIMP.

-The GIMP is very powerful, and cross-platform.  Its interface may take some time to get used to, however, and it is not suitable for extremely low-end computers.
-Paint.NET seems to be preferred by the majority of Nifforumers.  While not the most versatile or powerful of programs available, it is simple to use.
-Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro are perfectly suitable, but neither one is free, and most of their features will be useless in tileset creation.



Now, I'll explain how to use custom tilesets in the first place.
Every KS level has its own directory.  Inside your Knytt Stories directory is a directory named Worlds.
The Worlds directory contains another directory for each level.  A level's directory will be named [author's name] - [level name].
If a level has custom tilesets, then its directory will contain a directory named Tilesets.
Inside this directory will be one or more tilesets, labeled with Tileset[number].png.
The number determines the tileset's ID in the editor, hence Tileset43.png will appear in slot 43 in the editor, Tileset214.png in slot 214, and so on.  You can use slot 0, and there is no particular reason not to.



Now, the conditions that the tileset itself must satisfy:
-It must be a valid PNG image.
-It must be 384 pixels wide and 202 pixels tall.
-It must have no completely transparent tiles except for the one in the top left.  (Regardless of the content of the top left tile, the game will treat it as transparent, hence it is pointless to put anything in the top left tile.)

The ten pixels at the bottom are used for an info bar, which is generally used for the tileset title and author name.  It is up to you what you put in that 384x10 space if anything.



And now, the part four or five people have been waiting for: how to draw a tileset.

First of all, start up your image editor.
Then open [your KS directory]/Data/Tilesets/Tileset0.png.  This is the tileset "template"; it meets all the game's tileset requirements and has all the tiles neatly marked out for you.  For reference, it's this:


Then save it to [your KS directory]/Worlds/[your level's directory]/Tilesets/Tileset[number].png.  This will ensure that you don't accidentally save your own tileset over the Tileset0 in the Data folder (although if you do, it should be a trivial matter to correct).

You may want to turn on the grid function of your image editor; make sure it's set to 24x24 with no offset and no spacing.

Now it's finally time to start drawing - yay.
The first thing any KS tileset needs is its basic ground tiles.  Normally, this will be a box three tiles wide and three tiles tall, filled with some sort of texture.  Generally, the box will have a black outline that is one pixel thick, like this:


A simple ground texture will generally be a 4x4, 6x6, or 8x8 pattern of two colors.  It is generally preferable for the colors to not differ too strongly, and usually the result of this is that the second color is simply a different shade than the first color.  The best way to find an appealing texture is to experiment!
In any case, once you've drawn your texture, go ahead and copy-paste it to fill those nine tiles, then draw the box around it.  You'll end up with something like this:


Often, your ground tiles will look better if you put a slight layer of white or black "gloss" on their extremes.  Generally, you would do this by drawing over the desired pixels with Opacity set to 10% or so.  The effect is slight, but often very appealing.


A very common feature of tilesets is grass.  It is simple enough to draw; just draw a bunch of straight, dark green lines next to each other, constantly varying their height.  Generally, you'll want three or four grass tiles, and possibly "end" tiles:

(Here I've made two of the three tiles suitable for use as "end" tiles.  Also, the grass I've drawn here is rather taller than normal.  Of course, some tilesets won't have any place for grass at all.)

Another staple is background tiles, which can usually be done satisfactorily simply by altering the saturation, contrast, and especially brightness of the foreground tiles.  You may want to make multiple "flavors" of these.  Generally, they have 45-degree slopes instead of edges, for some reason.  It just looks better that way.  The tiles shown here would be used for, say, a cave:




And that's it!

No, really!  Drawing a simple tileset is, well, simple.  It takes a few minutes.  From there, you can simply add whatever you think suits the set.  I'm just going to add some rocks:


And make an example screen:




Really, you can hardly expect me to write a complete pixel art tutorial.  There are thousands of things you can draw in a tileset, and many of them I can't even properly draw myself, let alone tell someone else how to.  This is intended as sort of a quickstart guide, nothing else.

Oh, and y'all are free to use/edit/steal that tileset as you wish.  It isn't like it's very good or anything.



If this whole thing seems a bit bare-bones, it's because, well, it is.  I assume that you already know what Knytt Stories is, for example.