Abiathar Online: the web-based Keen Galaxy level editor

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Fleexy
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Abiathar Online: the web-based Keen Galaxy level editor

Post by Fleexy »

This is a thing I did a couple months ago and only told one or two people about.

All of my programming work is for desktop, mostly in .NET languages, so I figured I should probably learn web development so as to not become a fossil. Since HTML5+JavaScript is the new thing, I decided to jump into web development with that. The logical thing to make was a Keen Galaxy level editor.

And so we have Abiathar Online. It is a functional (but barebones) level editor for the Galaxy series. Files are loaded from and saved to Dropbox, so you'll need a Dropbox account to use it. (That may change as browsers add support for the HTML5 file APIs.) Controls are the same as those in Abiathar, but there are also clickable things to control plane states. The UI is super broken on mobile, but I hope to fix that sometime.

Areas for future development (i.e. things that aren't there):
  • Copy/paste
  • Rectangle fill
  • Tile ID entry
  • Highlight for the current tile in the tileset
  • Speed of initial level rendering
  • Keen Dreams support
  • Documentation/help
Oh, and because of how Dropbox works, it doesn't seem to be possible for me to modify files in place; saving always creates a new set of files with a number appended. That's a shame, and hopefully that can be addressed eventually.

This project is not at all intended to replace the real Abiathar, and the name has only been co-opted to indicate a shared author and color scheme. Abiathar Online will probably never catch up to Abiathar in features. To make disambiguation easier, I also sometimes refer to Abiathar Online as OpenThar.

Speaking of "open", this is all open source and on GitHub! I haven't decided on a license yet, so technically all rights are reserved except those required to be on GitHub, but I'll accept pull requests to the master branch. I'll take bug reports either here or in the Issues section.

So, without further ado, if you want to try the first web-based Keen Galaxy level editor:

Try Abiathar Online
Browse on GitHub

Happy modding,

Fleexy
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Post by Keening_Product »

Woah, this is neat! I vote web-based editor levelpack challenge to put it through its paces.

Also, good on you for open source. Given HTML5 can be used to make programs now there's no reason this couldn't be ported to be native to every OS as an application.
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MoffD
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Post by MoffD »

I was wondering if any more progress was going to be made after the 17cf92f commit, apparently github wasn't updating my feed. :rolleyes

Well... Glad it's finally getting initially released.
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Ceilick
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Post by Ceilick »

You are an essential asset to every keen galaxy modder, great work! I gave this a quick try on my phone here; the level loaded but it was composed of only the default foreground background tiles.
Mink
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Post by Mink »

this is neat! it's so fast and super cool
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