Area Building Tools

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Note: Installation and use of the software mentioned on this page is at your own risk. No warranty is expressed nor implied.

Apprentice's Workshop

The official editor for TFC is the Apprentice's Workshop, a web-based area creation tool which was written by Gwyrdain. Instructions on how to use it can be found in theApprentice's Workshop User Guide.

Sirak's Muditor

A locally installed option is Sirak's Muditor, A (pre-)Windows DOS-based (16-bit) application, written by Sirak. However, it is *NOT* recommended for several reasons:

  • Sirak's Muditor is a DOS program that will not run on x64 Windows systems; however, it may be possible to get the Muditor working by using an emulator, such as DOSBox (see below).
  • Sirak's Muditor does not contain recent additional flags for mobs and objects.
  • Sirak's Muditor crashes when you go above a certain number of resets.
  • Sirak's Muditor does not allow for high vnums.

Operating Systems

The Muditor will only run natively on old to ancient Windows and pre-Windows (DOS) systems. For newer Windows systems, it appears that the DOSBox DOS emulator can successfully run the Muditor. At the time of this writing, this has not been extensively tested. The Muditor may also work on other operating systems that support a 16-bit DOS emulator.

Area files are plain (pure ASCII) text, so areas can also be written just using a text editor. Doing so requires detailed knowledge of area file format, however, and is recommended only for masochists and/or coders. Area files must be plain ASCII text.

Installing Muditor on Windows

  1. Create a folder to install the Muditor files into (e.g. c:\Muditor).
  2. Retrieve a copy of the Muditor.
  3. When asked to save the file, save it within the folder you created in step 1.
  4. The Muditor files are stored within the ZIP file. On modern Windows operating systems, right-clicking the zip file will give an 'Extract All' menu option. Select that option.
  5. A box will appear asking where to save the files. Choose the folder you created above (e.g. c:\Muditor).
  6. Once the extraction is complete, several files are created.
  7. If you are not familiar with the Muditor, read the TUTORIAL.TXT file in the Muditor folder.
  8. The program runs in DOS (how things were done in the old days, before graphical Windows systems were created). In order to run the Muditor, it's necessary to open a DOS window. There are several ways to do this. One way is to go to Start -> Run... , and then in the dialog box, type 'cmd' (without the quotes).
  9. Change directory to the Muditor (cd \Muditor).
  10. The program file itself is called SMTFC20B.EXE. To run the program, type 'smtfc20b' (without the quotes). If it successfully starts, then you'll be able to start creating an area. If you get an error, such as an error about an unsupported 16-bit application, you will need to run the Muditor through an emulator program.

Installing DOSBox Emulator for Windows

  1. Download software from www.dosbox.com.
  2. Run the installer program.
  3. Accept the license agreement and install the program.

Using DOSBox with Muditor

  1. Start the DOSBox emulator. A DOS window should open with a Z drive prompt (Z:\>).
  2. Set DOSBox to use the Muditor directory. Assuming the Muditor files are at C:\MUDITOR: mount c c:\muditor (You should see a message that drive C is mounted as local directory c:\muditor.)
  3. Change to the C: drive in the DOSBox window: C: (Note the colon after C. It is important.)
  4. Start the Muditor in the DOSBox window: SMTFC20B