How to Build a World.rtf

::----- How to Build a World.rtf -----::
How To Build a World 
  
 I. Background 
  
 Make a background 8352 pixels wide by 1200 pixels high.  Make this using Creatures 256-color palette.  Save it as a BMP.  Convert it into a background sprite file with CrEd32 or a similar utility.  Give the sprite file  a name four letters long.  Put the background sprite file in the Images subdirectory if it is not already there. 
  
 II. Rooms 
  
 Make a room layout plan to fit into a map 8352 pixels wide by 1200 pixels high.  Point 0,0 is at the upper left.  The bottom right  is 8351, 1199.  Define all your rooms in terms of left, top, right,and bottom co-ordinates.  For purposes of installing them later you must define them as indoor, outdoor, or underwater.  Assign numbers to them, starting with 0. 
  
   1.	  Don’ t make the floors of t he uppermost rooms higher than 200 (that is, less than 200 in value).  Floors higher than 200 may result in jerky screen motion when the camera tracks norns walking in that room. 
   2.	   Make an import room in the vicinity of  2240 760 2970 930.  The creature impo rt spot is hard-coded so you must have a room there for the incoming creatures.  You can experiment to refine this area if you want to make it smaller.  Eggs injected by the GK will also appear near here. 
   3.	   No rooms can cross the wrap-around point, 8351 => 0.  You can cross this point with rafts, doors, or any type of transportation COB. 
   4.	   You must have at least one room defined at every point across the width of the map or you will have one or more black holes.  Black holes are points where there is no room an ywhere from top to bottom of the screen.  Anything or anyone dropped at these points will fall out of the graphics engine.  You needn’ t use all of the rooms for anything if some of them conflict with your plan, but they must be there. 
   5.	  Make sure the rooms a re tall enough for the COBs you plan to put in them. 
   6.	  If you don’  t work well analytically you can use the « sys: edit»  command below to design your rooms with the background in place.  However, the above guidelines still apply. 
    
 III. Matching Up I and II 
  
 To match the output of these two steps, use a copy of the blank world that you get when you open Creatures under the « doctor»   cheat.  Save it under some name, then quit Creatures.  Alternatively use one of the starter sfc files I have available on my site.  Hexedit the sfc file to use your background file.  The name of the Albian background file, « back»  , will be very near the beginning of the file.  Change this to the name of your file.  In the case of Terra Nornia I changed « back»  to « buro» .  Save the file a nd quit the hex editor.  If you open that world now under Creatures you will see your new background.  There will be one room defined, at the import point.  You can ignore that and begin entering your own room definitions.  Rooms are defined thusly:  
  
 room # left top right bottom type 
  
 where type is 
  
 indoors = 0 
 surface = 1 
 underwater = 2 
  
 So « room 0 20 27 120 227 1»  defines a surface room numbered « 0» , 100 pixels wide and 200 pixels tall.  This is a rather worthless room, as defined.  A useful command is 
  
 sys: edit left top right bottom 
  
 This command displays a pink box.  You can test your room definitions against your background appearance with this command.  To remove a room, define it as « room # 0 0 0 0 0» .  It will be, if not actually gone, as good as gone. 
  
 IV. Connecting the Rooms 
  
 Lifts should be used for vertical movement unless you want to define a special class of vertical transportation such as sinkholes.  Installation of lifts is a very touchy and tedious operation but basically simple. 
  
   1.	  Inject a  lift by hand (using the edit command to place it) and place it on one of the floors where you plan for it to stop. 
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