Author Topic: A Simple Guide To Testing Your Room Maps  (Read 11456 times)

Offline x4000

  • Chris McElligott Park, Arcen Founder and Lead Dev
  • Arcen Staff
  • Zenith Council Member Mark III
  • *****
  • Posts: 31,651
A Simple Guide To Testing Your Room Maps
« on: October 25, 2011, 09:25:48 am »
This assumes that you already know how to create maps, but that you want to test them easily.  This is best done not in your main world, but in a copy of it or similar.


Forcing the game to always generate your room for testing
-------------------------------------------------------------------

When there are 50 boss room templates, for instance, and you create a boss room map, it could take a long time and a lot of searching in the game before you find your specific room map.  Variety is key in AVWW, after all -- however, these steps make that process very simple for testing, and get rid of the variety to make things easier for you.

Step 1: In windows explorer / OSX finder, navigate to the folder where your new map is.
For the sake of further example, let's use GeneralBossRoom.  So we're talking about RuntimeData/Logic/RoomMaps/GeneralBossRoom inside the main AVWW folder.

Step 2: Make a subfolder called something like "test."
It doesn't really matter what you specifically call it, as the game won't be using it.

Step 3: Move all of the .txt files from the map folder into the new subfolder you create -- except for your map.
What this does is hide all of those other files from the game, so that it will only see your file.  This makes it so that any GeneralBossRoom you encounter in the game will always have your room template used, for instance.

Step 4: Locate an in-game room that uses your general type of room template
For instance, if you're making a new Hallway Doors10, go to a hallway that has at least 6 doors/vents in it.  If you're making a GeneralBossRoom, then go to pretty much any interior boss room in something like a rare boss tower.

If you've made it so that your template is now the only choice for the game to use, following steps 1-3 above, then every instance of that type of room will always be variants on your specific map.  Test Away!

Step 5: Putting things back the way they were for actual gameplay
Just move all the room map templates back out of the subfolder you created into their main folder (e.g., GeneralBossRoom).  And that's it!  You can leave or delete the subfolder, it won't matter to the game.



If you want to regenerate your current chunk
----------------------------------------------------------

If you're in a room that has your template, and you're not quite happy with some aspect of it, then you might want to tweak your map and then re-generate the room.  Trying to find another identical room would be a pain!  Fortunately, regenerating the room is pretty easy to do -- but for this step in particular, it is HIGHLY recommended that you do this in a world that is not your main play world, but rather is a copy for testing or similar.

Step 1: Hit F3 in the room you wish to re-generate, and write down both the region ID and chunk ID
You'll see a line near the bottom of the F3 debug info that has both the region ID and the chunk ID.  You'll need to write down both somewhere outside of the game, to use in a minute.

Step 2: Exit to the main menu of the game, or close the game.
The importance of this step is that it means that the in-memory copy of that chunk (room) gets written back to disk, and will later be read back off disk.  If you just walk out of the room while in-game into an adjacent room, you can wait about 10 seconds before doing step 3 and that would accomplish the same thing.  But that's a little slower and more error-prone.  The error being that the game might replace the chunk you're trying to delete in step 3, making it so that you have to delete it twice.

Step 3: Delete the chunk off the disk.
Using windows explorer or OSX finder, look in the RuntimeData/Worlds folder in your main AVWW folder.  Then look inside whatever your world folder is called.  You'll see lots of subfolders with numbers that correlate to region numbers.  Open the region subfolder that corresponds to the region ID you wrote down in step 1.  Now you'll see a lot of chunk files with a .datc extension.  Each of these also has a number that corresponds with their chunk ID.

Delete the .datc file with the ID that matches the chunk ID you wrote down in step 1.

Step 4: Go back to the game and into the room in question, and it will regenerate fresh!
Since the room is now missing off the disk, when the game tries to load it off disk it will fail and will thus regenerate the room.  If you've already killed the boss or gotten the treasure or whatever it won't regenerate those things as it will remember that you've done so, but it will still let you test your alterations to shape of the room as much as you like.
« Last Edit: May 05, 2012, 10:49:00 pm by tigersfan »
Have ideas or bug reports for one of our games?  Mantis for Suggestions and Bug Reports. Thanks for helping to make our games better!