Miniature Golf levels are made up of 5 components, playfield, hole position, initial ball position, an obstacle and the par score for the hole. The editor lets you change all of these elements with the same level of flexibility as the original author. Editing is done by uploading a simple script, the editor will then process the script and return a link to a ROM with your level placed as level one. Even if you've never written a script before you'll be able to get up to speed in no time by taking a look at the sample script HERE.
You can find the actual Miniature Golf Editor HERE.
Playfield
This is where the basic hole design is done. The resolution of the editable part of the background is 40x8. However like many Atari games Miniature Golf uses a mirrored playfield. This means that you only specify a 20x8 background which will then be mirrored on to the right side of the playfield. As you can imagine this makes hole design quite challenging. The solid top and bottom of the playfield are automatically generated so you can concentrate on the interesting part in the middle.
Below is the playfield section of a level script. As you can see the X's represent solid parts of the playfield and the .'s transparent parts of the playfield. This section is always 8 lines long. Only the first 20 characters are used any further characters are ignored.
X.............XX.... X...........XXXXXXXX X.........XXXX..XXXX X.......XXXXXXXXXXXX X.......XX..XXXXXXXX X.......XX..XX...... X.............XXXX.. X...................
Initial Ball Position
The initial ball position is simply two numbers representing the X and Y postion of the ball in the playfield. The 0,0 point is at the bottom left of the screen. Sensible ball positions are 7-155 for X and 2 - 82 for Y. Everthing after the semi colon (;) is a comment and ignored by the editor when processing your level. A sample script line is presented below.
135,68 ; Ball Position X (7-155),Y (2-82)
Hole Position
This works exactly the same as the ball position. It's just two numbers seperated by a comma. Sensible hole position are 7-155 for X and 2 - 82 for Y. A sample script line is presented below.
5,8 ; Hole Position X (7-155),Y (2-82)
The Obstacle
The obstacle is just a little more complex. It can move horizontally or vertically between two points. The obstacle script line contains 4 items seperated by commas. First is either a H or a V which sets the movement to be either horizontal or vertical. Next is the starting X and Y positions of the obstacle. Finally comes the range, this specifies how far the obstacle moves in the chosen direction. The range must always be 0 or greater.
One neat trick is setting the range to 0 for vertically moving obstacles, that causes the obsctacle to scroll of the top of the screen and reappear at the bottom. A sample script line is presented below.
V,20,50,0 ; Obstacle H/V,X,Y,RangePar Score
This ones easy, just a single number representing the par score for the hole. A sample script line is presented below.
5 ; ParA Complete Script
That's all there is to it. The easiest way to get started is to take a copy of the complete script below and change it to suite your needs. It's important that you keep the lines of the script in the same order as the sample script. If you have any problems I can be contacted at glenn@videofringe.com
X.............XX.... X...........XXXXXXXX X.........XXXX..XXXX X.......XXXXXXXXXXXX X.......XX..XXXXXXXX X.......XX..XX...... X.............XXXX.. X................... 135,68 ; Ball Position X (7-155),Y (2-82) 5,8 ; Hole Position X (7-155),Y (2-82) V,20,50,0 ; Obstacle H/V,X,Y,Range 5 ; Par