Hocus Pocus level editor

[Malvineous]

Hi all,

It's been a bit quiet here lately so I just thought I'd post an update showing the beginnings of support for editing Hocus Pocus levels. Many thanks to Spinal for figuring out the initial file formats and to K1n9 Duk3 for working out the rest of them, along with which files are which in hocus.dat (very important!)

I'm wondering what K1n9 Duk3 might be working on as he's been figuring out a bunch of Hocus Pocus file formats lately...

[moron]

interesting its just too bad no one is here any more

[Rigelatin]

Is the editor compatible with Windows? I tried it but couldn't get it running.

[Malvineous]

It is meant to be compatible but it's extremely difficult to compile open source software under Windows so I have kind of given up for the moment after spending a few days getting nowhere with it. It works great under Linux and there shouldn't be any issues under MacOSX either.

I will reinvestigate a Windows version (if nobody else has any luck) once the map editor is a bit more functional. Fingers crossed for some time in 2012 :-)

[lemm]

Cool.

Hocus Pocus had such nice graphics, it would be neat to see a level pack some day.

[Violet CLM]

Do you have any of the file formats left unfinished that I could help you with? Back around 2005-2007 I figured out everything but the sprites and how to specify which tiles worked as elevators in any given tileset. Obviously I never quite finished my level editor (it was almost all done, just couldn't decide on a UI for animated tile editing and was still figuring out the logistics of custom level distribution), let alone the levels I was making with it, so it'd be nice to see someone else do the work to get something done.


ETA: I dug through an old hard drive and found my progress, which I'll share here in case it can serve some use as inspiration or something: Download. It'll probably ask for some .dll which you can find by googling the filename. Extract the files into the same folder as a Registered v1.1 HOCUS.DAT.

HCS Beta.exe was the original design, and it's more feature-complete but less user-friendly. You'll need to run it first in order to pick a level to edit, but I'd recommend switching to the other program once a level's been extracted for editing from the .DAT file. HCS.exe is prettier but does fewer things. You can get to the setup for warps, "Creators," and "Removers" by right-clicking on the relevant actors in the level display: clicking Configure for switches, however, will freeze the program, so don't do that. I don't remember to what extent either supported saving, though at least one must, since I was certainly able to edit stuff... dunno. Enjoy.

[King Duke]

Originally Posted by Violet CLM

Do you have any of the file formats left unfinished that I could help you with? Back around 2005-2007 I figured out everything but the sprites and how to specify which tiles worked as elevators in any given tileset.

The elevators are pretty much the only important thing that I haven't been able to figure out (yet). By now, only the non-VOC sound files and files # 5 and 6 in the v1.1 registered .DAT file (one is 2880 bytes, the other is 2000 bytes in size) are in unknown format.

And by the way, I'm not planning to do a Level editor for the game. I just like the challenge of figuring out stuff like this.

[Videogamer555]

Where's the download link?

[Malvineous]

For my editor, you can compile it from source under Linux and probably Mac (not tested but should work if you know how to do it.) The code is available at GitHub: https://github.com/Malvineous/camoto-studio

There are quite a few prerequisite libraries, and the source for those is also available at GitHub. There are some basic instructions on the ModdingWiki which I will update now, since you made me realise I don't have download links anywhere for all the other libraries...

[Videogamer555]

Why don't you just post a copy of the Windows EXE file on Megaupload? Nobody who's just a gamer is gonna want to have to take comp-sci classes just to learn the knowledge needed on how to get a working copy of a prog that needs compiling.

[Malvineous]

To quote myself:

Originally Posted by Malvineous

it's extremely difficult to compile open source software under Windows so I have kind of given up for the moment

If you can figure out how to make a Windows EXE then I'll gladly host it on my own website, no need for Megaupload.

It's still very much in beta at the moment anyway, you can't make functional Hocus Pocus levels yet. Once you can, then I'll revisit a Windows version.