tUME (the Universal Map Editor)

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Asagoth
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tUME (the Universal Map Editor)

Post by Asagoth » Tue Aug 08, 2017 12:39 am

This Map Editor was used in many 8 bit and 16 bit games... for example Alladdin,Lion King , Global Gladiators,Cool Spot ,Earthworm Jim,etc.... you guys can download and read about it here https://segaretro.org/TUME .... this is a genuine tool of the Era...it was licensed to many developers from 1991 to 1996 including Virgin Games... It is currently avaiable as freeware...i just wanted to share this ... I hope it's useful for something.

Miquel
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Re: tUME (the Universal Map Editor)

Post by Miquel » Tue Aug 08, 2017 2:00 am

we disagree with many of the design decisions implicit in this tUMEPack. However, the product exists, and it works; so study it, and learn from it.
Probably the number of complains received has significant to start with this strong statement.

After a fast review of it, I can see it uses the typical map layout of metatiles of 16x16 pixels, pointing to 2x2 tiles.
But after that comes a few surprises, a contour map that forces the actors (entities) to move pixel by pixel inside the map (completely impractical on 16bit), and an object map (from where actors are created) (a huge waste of space). And lots of tools to convert to different formats.

So, a tool to make games faster, on a time where time was a critical issue (due to an economy growing firmer, so technology becomes obsolete quicker). Should be more like this today.
HELP. Spanish TVs are brain washing people to be hostile to me.

Asagoth
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Posts: 18
Joined: Sat Jul 29, 2017 11:09 am
Location: Portugal

Re: tUME (the Universal Map Editor)

Post by Asagoth » Tue Aug 08, 2017 2:27 pm

This software is a bit of an historical artifact ... here some of the features and better info https://web.archive.org/web/20111231054 ... tures.html , https://web.archive.org/web/20120319203 ... about.html , https://games.greggman.com/game/tume___ ... ap_editor/ ... and that was just referent to that tumepack...and not the TUME tool... those tumepacks are just external tools to convert the IFF files generated by TUME ... TP16 is just a costumized converter... TUME had a lot of demand by developers during the era...

Miquel
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Posts: 514
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Re: tUME (the Universal Map Editor)

Post by Miquel » Wed Aug 09, 2017 12:29 am

This is a "Sega Megadrive/Genesis development" site. You are right, I was analyzing it in the perspective of what you get when developing a 16bit game. Not an Amiga game, let's say (do I don't think is going to be much of a difference for first generations).

Paying for this software makes completely sense on a world were specialized graphical editing tools where rare, were having more than 4MB on your computer was a huge luxury, were current hardware last very few years.
HELP. Spanish TVs are brain washing people to be hostile to me.

Asagoth
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Posts: 18
Joined: Sat Jul 29, 2017 11:09 am
Location: Portugal

Re: tUME (the Universal Map Editor)

Post by Asagoth » Wed Aug 09, 2017 9:32 am

Tume was developed by Echidna a video game development company for use in the development of Amiga Games for "Future Classics" (publisher)... it was then acquired from echidna by Virgin Games , it was Dan Chang (a programmer ) of Echidna who adapted Tume to be functional on MS-DOS at Virgin Games request... the tool was efficient an soon the creators realized that it was general purpose enough to be usefull to other developers ... and between 1991 to 1996 it was licensed to many of them... tUME can edit maps for just about any 8 bit or 16 bit system , including SNES, SEGA Genesis, SEGA GameGear, Gameboy, Turbo-Grafx, Famicom, NES, Sega Master System, IBM, and Amiga.I must say this tool survived trough time... is now open source and freeware... Development on tUME slowed significantly by the end of 1994, as the authors of tUME believed the market for a 2D map editor was shrinking, but they were wrong... it's a "piece of history"... a genuine tool of "the 16 bit wars Era"... i just wanted to share this with you guys... somebody may find this useful... maybe... but you're right at that time developers had to create their own tools and these became obsolete quickly, that's not the case with TUME...TUME was created exactly to circumvent these problems...

PS: Echidna created also some personal libraries...you can download them here https://sourceforge.net/projects/elibs/ ... info about those libraries here http://elibs.sourceforge.net/... the Official Demo that came included with TUME, here's a video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDd_ExmQ114

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