Secret Agent vs Crystal Caves mashup

[Roobar]

Just a ridiculous combination (with very few changes) of all of the original Apogee SAM 1-3 daylight outdoor levels:

[Malvineous]

Hi all,

Just stumbled across this while I was looking for Secret Agent stuff. There is already Frenkel's Sammod utility for changing the graphics, but a level editor is a bit trickier.

I intend to make one, but it will involve a bit of a rethink as the game was designed to have levels edited by hand in a DOS text editor. Some of the tiles affect previous tiles, so for example if you place one tile for a 2x2 box, it overwrites the tiles before and above it. This means the level editor must either handle some items differently or behave a bit unpredictably. The good news is that Secret Agent actually looks like it's an earlier revision of the Crystal Caves engine (it seems Secret Agent took so long to develop it ended up being released after Crystal Caves) so figuring this out will also help with a Crystal Caves level editor.

Anyway, if you want to make your own SAM levels, you just need to decrypt SAM103.GFX and open it in a hex editor, or a text editor that can handle extended characters. Here's an already decrypted version. If you do it this way you'll have to carefully look at the map in the game and match it up against the characters in the file.

Here's a side-by-side comparison. Note that some items have moved since I took the screenshot a few seconds after entering the level. The uppercase Y is the start position, the backticks (````) are the water surface, with the underscore being the shark fin. The lowercase letter "p" are the windows, but although the window is two tiles wide, the "p" is only placed on the right-hand tile. It will overwrite whatever is on the left of it with the other half of the window (which is why a level editor is so tricky!)

Likewise the line starting with an asterisk is drawn over the top of the previous line. This is how the circuit board ("d") and the walkie-talkie ("f") can be placed on top of the 2x2 box (the pi symbol). If you look directly below that, the number 6 and 7 controls the brightness of the background tiles illuminated by the light, with the uppercase S being the light fixture itself. The dash ("-") appears in the same location as the red key, so if you keep going like this you can figure out what all the values are for.

But probably after taking all that in you would rather wait until a level editor is made instead

[Levellass]

I salute you for trying this; I myself tried and quickly stopped, knowing I had no chance.

[Roobar]

"Just stumbled across this while I was looking for Secret Agent stuff." that's cool . What words did you use? Don't you otherwise visit PCKF?

As for the editor, I'd rather wait for the better level editor instead. Thanks.

[Malvineous]

I was just searching for Secret Agent mods to see if anyone had written a level editor yet, and if so how they'd coped with the complex tile mapping. But it looks like there are no editors yet, so perhaps I will be the first to make one... Unfortunately though it's so tempting to add support to my programs for editing levels from more and more games, when really I should be spending the time improving the level editor itself since it's still extremely basic. What use is a level editor if it's painful to use? (case in point: Monster Bash - sure you can make your own levels but it will drive you insane...)

I do drop by the PCKF from time to time but don't post very often because I don't usually have much to say

[Levellass]

What use is a level editor if it's painful to use? (case in point: Monster Bash - sure you can make your own levels but it will drive you insane...)

People use Windows 8 don't they?

[Malvineous]

That's a very good point.