I already released TeddyBear, I am now working on getting a getup done for the Kthura Map Editor.

Now I hear you wonder why Kthura when you already have TeddyBear? Well that is because Kthura is every bit as unlike TeddyBear as you can imagine.

Two games using Kthura have been released on Game Jolt already, and they are The Fairy Tale REVAMPED and Star Story respectively. And although you may not see it at first glance, but nearly all cities and dungeons take advantage of what Kthura can do what TeddyBear (or any other tile based map editor) can’t.

Kthura is an object oriented map editor. Although it has a grid feature in the editor to help you (as grid based maps are easier to design), it doesn’t use in the engine, and every wall, every part of the floor, every tree, every whatever is just an object. Objects which can be manipulated during design but even real-time in-game. And not just appearing and disappearing, but there’s more. I shall reveal some secrets tricks only Kthura can provide due to it being Object-Oriented, and perhaps you should play the games above to see these tricks

• In most forest or nature locations, the trees (or whatever I placed there) are rarely following a grid, but just placed randomly to create a more natural effect.

• The Grass Jungle in star Story has all grass objects animated at different speed. This same effect has also been used in nearly all dungeons were torches and candles have been featured.

• Although most “indoor” locations follow a 32x32 grid (for easiness) I did quite often create some walls and floors that do not follow the grid and make them blend it with 32x32 grid based stuff.

• The scene in which you see a pod flying through space in which Wendicka, Crystal and ExHuRU escaped Excalibur was actually just a Kthura map.

• The pod being parked and being crashed were just the same picture, only rotated. Rotation is a very powerful feature within Kthura, and the teleporters in the Fairy Tale REVAMPED also make sure of Kthura’s rotation feature.

• The plasma floors in the Spirata Temples (TFT REVAMPED) were also possible thanks to Kthura. It has been a real challenge to do that right though.

• The river in the Sub-Terranean river sidequest in TFT REVAMPED as also Kthura’s magic at work.

And there’s much more I did there, and I bet Kthura even provides possibilities that didn’t yet even come to my mind. And that is why I am now trying to set up a more easy to set up version of the Kthura Editor in C# (my own version written in BlitzMax is beyond doing this, plus I don’t wanna be reliant on BlitzMax anymore since the language appears to be dying). It may still be some work to set it up properly.

Export

Kthura uses its own native format based on JCR6. Due to JCR6’s merging functions this is a great way of working for me. Of course, it may not be your way of working, and if you wanna set up your own engine for handling Kthura maps, but don’t wish to load “real” Kthura files, I am planning to make Kthura able to export to the next formats:

• Lua

• JSON

• JavaScript*

• Python*

• XML**

• I know that both Python and JavaScript are based on JSON, but the big diffrence will be that files exported to Python can be imported with the “import” command, and a JavaScript export will have a variable named “KthuraMap” containing all the map stuff.

** No promises on XML yet, but I am looking into this. XML is a kind of a terrible format, but since there are many parses able to read it, well, what the heck.

Note about Ruby: I never used Ruby myself, except for creating HomeBrew casks, back when I was still a Mac user. However I just used ready-to-go templates for that. Since the syntax of Ruby is not really to my liking, I was never motivated to sort it out fully. If you can help me on exporting to Ruby, hey sure, let me know and I will tell you when the exporters are being coded so I can put the Ruby exporter in. I do know there are JSON parsers for Ruby out there (and I would also not be surprised if parsing XML was also possible).

When will this come to Game Jolt?

I don’t know that yet. There is still too much to do to give you an ETA, and if you’ve been following my blogs you also know that I’m scheduled for surgery to get my gallbladder removed, and well, the exact date the surgery will take place is not yet known (and I wouldn’t announce it anyway, as doing that on the internet is beyond stupidity), but it can delay all my projects including this one. I work as hard as I can (also in my own interest, as this Kthura version may be used in my future projects too).