Lunar Magic v1.20

posted in Emulator Release by generalme on May 31st, 2001

Lunar Magic, a Super Mario World Level Editor (SNES), has been updated to version 1.20. Here's the HUGE what's new list:
  • Added a Windows Help file to the program. The online documentation on the website will be taken down, since the help file is more easily maintained and generally more helpful.
  • Added Cut/Copy/Paste commands for objects/sprites to the "Edit" menu. This allows copying compatible objects or sprites between levels. In fact, since it was implemented using the standard Windows Clipboard, you can even copy between multiple instances of Lunar Magic!
  • Implemented basic SNES layering and color addition support, so that level modes 1E and 1F will now show up in the editor as they would in the game. Although technically none of Nintendo's levels appear to have used those modes in the first place, it's still rather interesting to be able to make a translucent level. ^^
  • Rewrote the animated tile support; Lunar Magic will now read the data from the ROM rather than having it hard coded. Additionally, the "On/Off" block and the "always-turning" turn block will now show up as they'd appear in the game.
  • Included a minor ROM modification that will enable support for the animated water surface tile in tile sets 4,5,7,9 & D (in other words, all the tile sets where the water surface would show up as a blue question block). The modification will be inserted automatically the first time you save a level to the ROM.
  • Added an ASM hack to allow appending a selectable ExGFX or GFX file to the end of the animated tile area, for use in animated tiles.
  • Added Flip X/Y buttons to the 16x16 editor window.
  • Made a few minor modifications to the placement of certain window elements. Probably the most noticeable change is that the status bar is now anchored to the bottom of the main window, which is really where I should have put it in the first place.
  • Fixed a minor bug in the 8x8 tile editor, where it wouldn’t update the colors of the current palette it was using if the window was open while a different level was loaded. There was also an annoying screen flicker when that happened, which has also been fixed.
  • The "Add Sprites" window will now display a small line of text at the top left of the preview screen to suggest which GFX files could be loaded into SP3/SP4 to view the sprite properly.
  • Sprite 8C, the smoke and fire generator for Yoshi's house that also allows Mario to walk off the edge of the screen without passing the level, will apparently not display any smoke or fire when (x&1) is true. Lunar Magic has been updated to do the same.
  • Added a third category list to the "Add Sprites" window. The new category will contain the special sprite commands (like layer 2 scrolling, for example) and the sprite generators.
  • Object 12 apparently does not detect and adjust for the tiles it is overwriting for the 4 upside-down slopes. This has been corrected in Lunar Magic. A thank you goes out to Jonathan for noticing this one.
  • Lunar Magic will now identify and display in the status bar the contents of a block tile that has been placed using the Direct Map16 Access feature.
  • Put in a warning message to notify the user when the exe file has been modified/corrupted by something (like a virus, for example). Previously the program would just silently terminate itself on startup when that happened, which wasn’t exactly informative.
  • Various other minor updates.
You can get it at the Facelifting Utilities page. Thanks ßouché!