I did some searching but couldn't find very much info on level editing. Perhaps I failed, but I decided to explore the image importing on my own (including testing it with shapes like circles, and 1 pixel-wide holes) and I collapsed all my findings into this blog post which has all my source images and rendered results:
http://www.henrycipolla.com/blog/2010/1 ... l-editing/
The key takeaways are:
- The built in level editor is unstable and laborious. Instead, the optimal way to create levels is to import .pngs with level data within the editor
- Most graphics editors save as .png. mspaint on windows is a good solution. For the tests below, I used Gimp
- To import a .png it must have a white background and at least 1 pixel of white all the way around the border. Images with colors on the border will hang the editor.
- The UI only lets you browse to folders within the Frozen Synapse folder. So I created a new folder inside the psychoff folder named “maps” and put my images in there, so they would be accessible in the game
- Red pixels make up solid walls, blue pixels make up cover.
- The colors don’t need to be perfect. I.E. 0xFF0000 is all red, but 0xAA0000 also works
- 1024×768 is a good starting size for a 3 or 4 man game
- Circles and diagonals are allowed. But I’d be wary of their impact on pathing
- A shotgun can aim through a 1 pixel hole or 1 pixel of cover
- A unit needs at least 23 pixels to make it through an entryway. However the rules are not consistent (i.e. not every 23 pixel entryway works).
It is easy to test level pathing in the editor
