Camoto Studio Online

Copyright 2010-2021 Adam Nielsen <malvineous@shikadi.net>

This is a web application for editing MS-DOS games from the 1990s. It runs in a web browser and lets you create your own levels, change the music and graphics, and make other changes to games.

Users

If you want to use this to edit games, you probably don't want to run this code, but rather visit the site at https://camoto.shikadi.net where this code runs.

Development

If you want to add support for more games or improve the editors in some way, great! Depending on what you want to do, the code might belong in another repository (perhaps more than one):

• gamearchive.js handles reading and writing of any archive files, including extracting large data chunks out of .exe files.

• gamecomp.js handles applying and removing any compression or encryption. It is mostly used by gamearchive.js to decompress files inside archives, but the algorithms are available for use by all libraries. gamecode.js for example, uses them to decompress .exe files.

• gamegraphics.js handles decoding and encoding images, palettes, tilesets and animations.

• gamemaps.js handles the levels themselves, including how to map tiles back to the images and tilesets provided by gamegraphics.js.

• gamecode.js handles extracting small amounts of information from game .exe files. Things like text strings for the game's user interface, and filenames the game uses to load data are made available for modification through this library.

• gameinfo.js ties everything together, providing a list of items that can be edited in each game. It handles things like loading the right tilesets for a level editor to use, knowing which palettes to use for which images, splitting or combining tilesets into a more logical arrangement, and so on. It relies on all the other libraries for reading information from games and for actually loading and saving them as class instances.

• studio.js is this project, which uses gameinfo.js to load and save game items. It also provides a set of editors, such as a level editor that can modify the Map class instances returned by gameinfo.js. It does not have any knowledge of any specific games - at this point it's all generic, with the differences between games abstracted away by gameinfo.js.

In order to add support for a new game, first all the file formats must be implemented in the various libraries - any archives in gamearchive.js, the images in gamegraphics.js, and so on. Last of all, the game can be added to gameinfo.js, at which point it will be available for editing in Camoto Studio.

Running locally

1. npm install to download dependencies
2. npm start to run the web server locally
3. Open http://localhost:3000 in a browser.

If you will be doing development on the underlying libraries as well (adding new file formats) you may wish to have the local Camoto Studio access local development versions of the other Camoto libraries as well to assist with development. Assuming all the git repos are cloned into subfolders in the same parent directory, you can do this:

1. cd studiojs
2. npm uninstall @camoto/gamearchive
3. npm install ../gamearchivejs/
4. Repeat for whichever libraries are available locally.

If you do this, remember not to include the package*.json files in any PRs as they will now refer to your local installs.

You can easily undo the above changes by performing it in reverse, to switch from local versions to the lastest published version:

1. npm uninstall @camoto/gamearchive (yes even for the local version)
2. npm install @camoto/gamearchive

Debugging

In the browser console, run:

localStorage.debug = 'game*';

This enables all the debug() calls which will appear in the browser console.

Credits

Joystick favicon by Twitter twemoji.