ZLADE is dead

I come to you today with sad news from the Link's Awakening Hacking community (which, mind you, is like, ten people total). ZLADE, the Zelda Link's Awakening Dx Editor, as of the 24th, is now defunct, and will not be updated anymore.

This is bad, because ZLADE was the leading ZLA editor out there. Now, I have downloaded the last version of ZLADE, and obviously there is room for improvement, but it works, so I am sad to see it go.

HOWEVER. After taking a look at what ZLADE did wrong and right, I have ideas for my own editor. It will operate on a sophisticated class library. It will include editing dungeon objects and not be able to add more than the capacity of objects for each room without repointing, which is what ZLADE did that made one of my roms crash.

It will include warp editors, event editors, room sequence editors, pallette transition editors. It will have an option to export hex code for each room, so that people who knows whats going on with the actual code will have a better time. It will have an option to edit the overworld objects and tile data together with ease. It will have functions to erase EVERYTHING and start completely over with a new game.This I intend to do.

There are two logistic things standing in my way.

1. I do not know how to operate on a byte by byte basis with C++ and the Windows API. I am sure it is possible, but I have no idea what is consists of.

2. I do not know how to load 2 bit per pixel graphics from the rom into an editor. This is a big one. Fortunately, I have learned a way to display hex values on screen and work with them in the code.


So, today marks the death of ZLADE, but it also marks the time before the birth of another great editor.