Like I said, the game will come with both

I might have other things that I did somewhere on the hard drive... I'll guess I'll go and look for them.

That would be great...I took a look at your work, and it's EXCELLENT, but now I'm curious as to what you can do with bigger sprites.

If you can't find anything, I have couple of tests.  You can pick which one you want to do, but since each one corresponds to a different sprite-designing position in S.A.D., I would encourage you to try both.

1. Draw a 16 x 16 sprite of an erupting volcano
2. Draw a 24 high by 16 wide sprite of a man in a military outfit holding a mug. 

I assume maps will get archived on exit, right?

Good question.  Actually, maps stayed archived the whole time, and are never unarchived.  They just get copied to RAM, and then the ram with the map is cleared when the player returns to the main menu.  This also applies to tilesets.

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The map editor allows one to create maps, map packs, tilesets and tilepacks.  A user compiles these into application variables for S.A.D.  I will give you the S.A.D. appvar file formats as soon as I can, but here's some information for you to start writing the program.  As always, feel free to ask questions, especially on irc if you can

Tilesets
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-A tileset can have up to 256 tiles.  Assume temporaily that tiles are 8x8, but be prepared for 16x16.
-The map editor assumes that the actual graphics for the tile set have been created as a bitmap.
-To create a tileset, one opens a tileset designer from the map editor.
-The first step is to give a name for the tileset, up to 8 characters.  The user also selects the bitmap with all the tiles designed on it.
-After the user selects the bitmap and names the tileset, the designer scrolls through each tile in the bitmap, one by one.  The user can either mark it as a standard tile, a tile with collision, or a tile containing a form of belthium crystals (full deposit, 1/4, halfway-mined, and 3/4)
-The tileset is then saved in two formats.  One is for the map-editor to use, the other is for S.A.D. to use.  You can decide how you want to save tilesets in map-editor format, but I would suggest that all you need is the name of the tileset and the bitmap location on the computer.

Tilepacks
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Tilepacks are collections of tilesets.  The map editor can create tilepacks for S.A.D., but it doesn't use them.  Basically, if the user wants to compile a tilepack, a dialog opens allowing a user to select as many tilesets to compile together as the person wants.  As the user adds more and more, the program will display how many bytes of calculator space the tilepack will take

Maps/Map Editor
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-An S.A.D. map can hold up to 10000 tiles.  That means that the height * width cannot be bigger than 10000.
-A tileset is chosen for the map by the user as the map is set up.  Once a tileset is chosen, it cannot be changed for the particular map, and only one tileset can be used.  When the map designer is loaded in the GUI, the tileset (as a bitmap) is loaded in a seperate window, allowing a user to choose tiles to paint.
-Grids can be turned on or off.
-There should be a button to allow a person to place starting locations.
-Maps can be saved, loaded, etc.  They can also be compiled to S.A.D. format when ready.

Map Packs
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Collections of maps.  These are created the same way as Tilepacks are, and once again, can only be made, not used, by the map editor

Well, Eeems is doing the on calc one, but I think someone else hopes to do the computer-based one

cooliojazz, we're still trying to figure out between 8x8 and 16x16 tiles.  Is there any way you can make the map designer so that it can handle whatever one we choose?  For instance, a constant called tilesize that can be edited in the program code

By the way, I'm pretty sure I have someone else willing to work on the campaign designer, so at least for right now, I won't need you for that

There's still more we have to plan out.  It's mostly the AI and data formats