Here’s a bit of a blast from the past. I managed to get ccedit working again. This was the original level editor for workingset.net/2022/12/2… my Chips Challenge “fan game” I’ve been working on.

I’ve been designing a few levels for it recently, but since moving to a new Mac, the level editor I was using was going to be difficult to port. It’s QT application and the QT bindings were a pain to setup, and I rather not go through that again. I was using a Mac at the time I started working on it, but I wasn’t yet ready to go all in on MacOS. So to hedge my bets, I decided to go with QT as the UI toolkit.

This was 5 years ago and I’m unlikely to go back to Linux, so choosing QT was a bit of a bad decision. I think if I had my time again, I’d go with something like AppKit.

Anyway, the level editor still works but I have to log into a screen share to use it. I’d like to be able to edit levels on the machine I’m using now.

The code for the original level editor was still around but it hasn’t been touched in ages. It’s basically an SDL application — the same graphics library I’m using for the actual game itself — and the SDL v2 bindings I’m using are still maintained, so updating those were quite easy1.

One thing I did have to pull out was the Lua VM2. The editor was using old C Lua bindings. Better Lua VMs written in pure Go are now available, so I didn’t want to keep using these old bindings anymore. In fact, I didn’t want to use Lua at all. Lua was originally used for the level scripts, but I replaced this in favour of another language (which is no longer maintained 😒, but I’m not changing it again).

The original CCLM Editor
The original CCLM Editor

So far the editor boots up, but that’s about it. I can move the cursor around but I can’t add new tiles or load existing levels. There seems to be some weird things going on with the image name lookup. I originally thought image name were case insensitive, but after looking at the image name lookup logic in the game itself, I’m not so sure.

How much time I’d like to spend on this is still a bit of a question. It all depends whether I’d like to release the game itself in some fashion. There are still questions about whether I’m allowed to, given that the graphics are not my own. Still need to think about that.

But in any case, good to see the old editor again.

  1. The level editor was actually using older SDL v1 bindings, but it was relatively easy to port them over to v2, although some gaps are still present. ↩︎

  2. Lua was actually the second language used by the editor. The first was a Go native TCL interpretor. ↩︎