King's Valley Spy 2.0 released

In January 2017, MSX user Graham release King's Valley Spy. This tool to edit KVII stages has now been updated to version 2.

King's Valley Spy is a Windows based, MSX compatible King's Valley II level editor. It offers the following features over Konami's in-game editor:

Remove misplaced stones/tools/enemies/soul stones
Add and delete rooms
Change the room layout
Use multiple undo buffers
Fill or clear rooms and stages with one click
Zoom out for a bird's eye view
Right-mouse drag the level
Export level maps
Auto-adjust trap heights when bricks are added
Auto-fix overwritten or misplaced ladders
See the number of items left (soul stones/tools etc)
Add a room grid for outlining room borders
Add a brick grid for outlining rows and columns
View levels in classic 8bit styles (Vampire, Goons, Galious)*
Drag&Drop ELG files for fast load
Start from sample levels

It can be found on: http://beastybytes.blogspot.com/

Comments (2)

By sd_snatcher

Prophet (3675)

21-02-2017, 22:58

I loved this tool, Graham! And I have some good news: it works perfectly via wine on a Mac! :)

If I may, it would be lovely to have some kind of setting to change the mouse mode to Mac mode:

- scroll wheel used to scroll vertically and horizontally, and not for zoom
- zoom done via pinch zoom (but I have no idea how the pinch zoom info is sent to the windows application)
- right button used as a shortcut to erase

Other than that, here are some other small suggestions for polishing the interface:

- Do not zoom the icons and texts when a higher resolution is set in the settings.txt file. This will allow more area for the map editing and will also avoid the weird artifacts in the icons/text
- Use anti-alias in the map zoom
- Highlight in red the disconnected rooms in the layout as a visual way to warn the user that this is incorrect. Use white to indicate the currently selected room
- Automatically update the currently selected room indicator when the user clicks on a given groom when zoomed out

By Graham

Supporter (13)

22-02-2017, 10:21

Excellent suggestions, thanks!

As a sidenote: the settings.txt file is there for future proofing, for the use of 4K and 8K displays. Assuming anyone still remembers King's Valley by then, the dpi's will be so high you actually want to scale the entire UI of the program so it is still visible on screen

Apart from this, there is no upscaling in the application. The images look block-y on the highest zoom-level simply because they were drawn that way. It's possible to create much better graphics, but any attempt I made to make it look more smooth took away the whole 'king's valley' feel of it. So I decided early on to re-create the graphics with a decidedly 8bit feel to them as a homage to the original msx version and the Konami graphics

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