The Great Labyrinth Tutorial - Highly Recommended

Tyhm · #1 04-14-2002, 11:22 AM

I recieved a few requests, so what the hey. Anyone who's seen the labyrinth on Classic and wondered how the hell anyone managed to sit down and do that huge thing, here's the skinny.

Download and unzip the attatched file, so you have something to look at while you read along. Also, save the objectslabyrinth file in your graal2001/tileobjects folder

1) First, you're gonna need a map which is 64x/3 pixels by 64y/3 pixels (where x and y is the size of your labyrinth, in levels). The way I always do it is to draw a map in 3 colors - the levelgen's Dirt, Dirt Smallrocks, and Dirt Bigrocks colors (see labytut0.bmp). Notice that the two Wall colors meet only at the corners. Good reason for that, as you'll find out soon. Another way you could do this, hypothetically, is take a readymade 2-color map and resize/recolor it, but I can see that getting really ugly.
2) Now resize your map 300%. If it's not a multiple of 64 pixels in both directions, add some borders to it until it is. Save it as 256-color png. (see labytut1.png)
3) Run it through the levelgenerator. It'll spit out the correct number of map levels drawn in dirt and rocks, along with a bigmap.txt file for it all. (see labytut_a-1.graal) If you can do maps, go for it, otherwise forget about it - I'm not explaining that too.
4) Open all the levels. Use the labyrinth palette to FIRST place the corners over the intersections and ends, then use the flood fill option (select an object and right-click an area) to fill in the walls. When it's done, fill in the dirt with the ground tiles by placing one, double-clicking to set it as the background tile, selecting an area and hitting delete - unfortunately, dirt is not all the same tile like the rocks are.
You'll have to drag the corners around and fuss with the walls a little, as it won't all line up perfectly. (see labytutfin.graal)

Tedious, but it works. I leave you to figure out the details.

It would probably work even better if you use the small rocks for the background, big rocks for the walls, and double up the objects. You get to make all your own objects for that, though.