Editor Map View

The SUAVE level editor is launched from the intro screen. It has two modes: Map View and Room View. The map view, which this page is about, is used to develop the layout of rooms in a map. The room view is used to develop the content inside of a room.



In both editor modes, you can pan and zoom to see different parts of what you're editing. Panning can be done with the arrow keys on the keyboard, or holding down the right mousebutton and dragging. Zooming can be done with the plus and minus keys on the keyboard (not keypad), or with the mouse's scrollwheel (if it has one). Zooming may also be done by holding both mousebuttons down, but hit the right one first or you may end up selecting something you don't mean to.

Along the top of the screen is a row of icons. Moving the mouse pointer over these icons will display the name of the icon just below it. When an icon is selected, it may have a brief description of what it does at the bottom of the screen.

Both editor modes have the same icons at the left and right of the bar. These are:
Map View: Switches back to map view if you're in room view.
Room View: Switches to room view from map view, if you have a room selected (see Select, below)
Load: Loads a map to be edited.
Save: Saves the current map to a file.
Quit to Main Menu: Goes back to the title screen. Any unsaved changes will be lost.

The icons in the middle are the Map View functions:
Select: Using this tool to click on things can allow you to edit their properties. Selecting a room will allow you to change the room's style, or to delete the room if there are no doors leading to it. Double-clicking on a room with this tool will bring you to that room's Room View.

Selecting a door with this will allow you to change its style and lock, or delete it. Door locks are very useful, and aren't limited to keys. There are enemy-sensitive locks as well. Note which side of the door the icons are on the one-way and enemy sensitive doors. These tell you which side of the door does what. There's an option to swap the door's direction for these directional locks.

Selecting the player with this will allow you to set which direction players will start facing, and how many lives they start with.
Move: Click this over objects and drag to move them. Dragging rooms that have doors will cause the doors to turn into trick doors (see New Trick Door below for a description of trick doors). Dragging the player changes the player's starting place. Non-trick doors stay whole when dragged, and both ends of a trick door can be dragged independently.
Resize: Click and drag the sides of a room to change its size.
New Room: Click, hold down, and drag to define new rooms. New rooms must be made in unoccupied space.
New Door: Click to make doors between rooms. This will only work when you click a wall that's shared between two rooms.
New Trick Door: Trick doors are doors whose source and destination aren't next to each other. A player traveling through a trick door may not notice anything out of the ordinary. On the map, these are represented by a half-door with a red arrow pointing to another half-door. With trick doors, two doors next to each other in one room could lead to different, distant corners of the map.

Trick doors are placed by clicking once to place one side of the door, and again to place the other. The other side must be in a different room than the first, and must be on an opposite wall from the first. For example, a trick door that starts on the north wall of one room would need to end on the south wall of any other room, but it could be on the other side of the map.
Copy Selected Room: If a room is selected with the Select tool, click this button and the computer will memorize it.
Paste: Clicking this button will make an exact copy of the room memorized by the Copy Selected Room button. It may be placed on the map in any unoccupied space large enough to fit it. It will not have any doors when placed. The copy and paste buttons may be used to transfer rooms between files.
Playtest Map: Just like playing the map from the main menu, but you'll find yourself back in the editor when the game is over.