egomassive's Knytt Stories Plus mod

I concur. It would be nice to have those included by default.

In fact, even if I haven't yet tried to make a KS+ enhanced level, I'm probably going to use the improved editor in my next project. Those stacked translucent tiles I used in my levels (especially the last one) were a pain to handle in the regular KS editor. Reading that there's a fix for that coming up made my day

After trying many many things, I fixed the level editor's failure to draw identical tiles layered on top of one another. However, it's so hacky and ridiculous that I hate it! The bug is caused by one of those internal MMF behaviors that programmers have no access to. It seems to be pure luck that it works in KS itself.

When KS draws a screen it adds whole layers at a time. When the level editor draws a screen it goes tile by tile. This is so when you change one tile it only has to update that coordinate's stack of graphics. What difference in these 2 methods causes one to work and not the other I cannot determine.

My solution, is to draw each tile in 2 parts. For each layer I split the tile in a different way. It never draws the same partial tile in the same spot, so it works even when it's the same whole tile.

I haven't released it yet. It should be out soon.

Um, if this is going to make the editor even more laggy I'd rather do without it.

That's exactly what I'm worried about with a fix like this. I doubt it's a noticeable difference. I'll run some tests to see. It might have to become a menu option. I'm also considering giving each virtual layer it's own actual layer. Currently there are 3 layers for the gradient, the tiles, and the objects. If I switch that to 9 layers then I shouldn't have this drawing issue and I'll be able to seamlessly move layer 2 to it's "overlay" position. This will take a lot of time to implement, so I'm still thinking about it.

The biggest lag with the editor is a built in one. It hangs for 10 frames to give itself time to check tilesets and gradients for compatibility. I vaguely remember making it not check if you're trying to rapidly scroll through screens. Recently I've been considering just doing away with these checks. Personally they're a nuisance. It's not going to crash the game if a designer uses a poorly sized gradient or chooses an ambiance track that doesn't exist.

Honestly, testing overlaying tiles is much less annoying to me than not being able to see things at all that you can only see at 2x or 3x zoom. The only thing I'd really want out of an editor improvement, that would be absolutely huge, to how I make levels, is a zoom feature in the editor.

A couple things I've noticed:
I can't get the "set start" to hold onto flags. It's not as if it tries and doesn't work I enable a flag on the start and then the start is set but the flag enabled just goes away. It's not visual because I've tested the level as well and the flag isn't enabled. I've used a shift over where you start to get around this.

Swim blocks are causing their sort of launching capability (when you exit them) to carry over in a screen above them. So when you jump from a screen with the top of water to the next screen above them if there's nothing to block you immediately Juni is launched like she's hitting a couple updraft blocks with her umbrella open. It's not reproducible 100% of the time but it happens more than half the time, at least.

It's actually really enjoyable because it's like Juni has a super jump, it's like an updraft object without the slowing effect of opening an umbrella.

Swim blocks are causing their sort of launching capability (when you exit them) to carry over in a screen above them. So when you jump from a screen with the top of water to the next screen above them if there's nothing to block you immediately Juni is launched like she's hitting a couple updraft blocks with her umbrella open. It's not reproducible 100% of the time but it happens more than half the time, at least.

I get this boost when jumping to the screen above regardless of whether I've touched water or not, there just has to be a water surface object on the lower screen. Maybe you meant this already, though. I think it might qualify as a bug that ought to be fixed regardless of how fun it is, so hopefully you're not designing challenges around it.

I think it might qualify as a bug that ought to be fixed regardless of how fun it is, so hopefully you're not designing challenges around it.

No, I only meant that it's an interesting feature if it could be isolated for its entirely own block, to have a sort of single use updraft block that didn't require an umbrella.

I think I've figured out the nature of the bug, by the way! It's when there's a water object at the bottom the screen at the same y position as the player. I've seen Juni's coordinates change before a new room is loaded many times, so I'm guessing it's related to that and she's hitting the water object for a split second before the start of a new room.

Oy! I've had so many issues of this nature. Thanks for finding it plural and thank you for figuring it out Sergio. I'll certainly be fixing that. I just knew that the extra push needed to get out of the water was going to cause physics anomalies.

As for a scaled up version of the editor, I too have been wanting it to be easier to see lately. I've been doing a lot of level design when I'm tired. It would be a huge undertaking because there are 3 windows embedded in a parent window and 90% of the editor is based on Cartesian coordinates. I had an idea to leave the editor as it is, but create a separate, scale-able preview window. No promises at this time.

Here's the Level Editor update.

Get KSLE+ 1.0.4

What's new:

• Hold Space Bar to see a preview scaled to fit your screen.*
• On the World tab click the hologram button to enable/disable hologram limiting.
• Fixed Flags for setting starting point.
• Added F1 descriptions for objects and features that didn't have them.

*The map editor section must have focus for the preview panel to show. The preview panel will only show the layers you have set to be visible. It will reorder the layers if overlay is active. If you have the script panel open it will use your unsaved data for COs and Overlay. The accurate screen drawing was much slower than before. Since the preview panel draws correctly I left the canvas as it was. I can't test the auto-scaling for larger screen sizes,  1800:720 and 2400:960. I'd appreciate hearing if it looks right to anyone out there with enormous monitors.

Forgive me if this has already been asked before (I did try searching the entire topic multiple times), but I have a small request/suggestion: would it be possible to make the game stay in fullscreen mode after pressing F2 to return to the main menu, if you had this mode enabled? It's a bit annoying having to toggle fullscreen mode off and on every time I want to quit a level to play another one, because doing that changes the screen resolution (which takes my monitor a few seconds to process and messes up my desktop a little).

I noticed you enabled the F2 key shortcut while in fullscreen mode, which is already a nice improvement over the original KS, but it would be great if you could reset the game without having to press Alt+Enter more than once per session.

BTW, I'm not sure if 1920x1200 qualifies as an enormous resolution, but I tested the new preview function and it seems to be working fine. The overlapped tiles that can't be seen in the main editor window show up correctly in the preview, just as you said. Nice!

@Vegetal Gibber: Thanks for checking the 1800x720 scale for me. It's really the 2400x960 scale that I was calling enormous. I was just thinking of forwards compatibility with that one.

I suppose your fullscreen request is possible. Currently F2 completely restarts the application, but I see no reason why it can't return you to the main menu the way winning a game does.

@Vegetal Gibber: Thanks for checking the 1800x720 scale for me. It's really the 2400x960 scale that I was calling enormous. I was just thinking of forwards compatibility with that one.

I suppose your fullscreen request is possible. Currently F2 completely restarts the application, but I see no reason why it can't return you to the main menu the way winning a game does.

Well, you can consider the 2400x960 scale working correctly at least on my system.

Thanks Alan. I'm thinking of making the 300% scale setting used in KS+ into a maximum auto-scale setting. This means it would jump from 200% to 400% for you. As screens grow larger it could jump to 500%, 600%, etc.

Quick newbie question:

I have a few levels in the making that I'm interested in optimizing for KS+ while still keeping them compatible with the original KS. By "optimizing" I mean enabling the single-pass render mode by default, as these levels contain a lot of COs and could benefit a lot from the flicker-free screen transitions. Can this be accomplished by setting something in the World.ini file, or do I need to release a KS+ version separately?