The Quest Editor

Designing Zelda Classic quests is a fairly complicated task. I'm trying to make the editor as user-friendly as possible, but it will still have a pretty steep learning curve. Below is a summary of what it can and can't do right now.

What it can do

Tiles

• ZC allows you to have 1560 16x16 tiles. These tiles are used for both background tiles and sprites.
• ZQuest lets you create, edit, and import tiles. They can be "grabbed" from image files, ZQuest tile files, or game binaries like ROMs and save states.
• You can define which tiles to use for each item and weapon, and even set up some simple animation for each.

Maps

• Screens are divided up into 16x8-screen maps with a few extra screens per map for caves, passages, and a screen template.
• As with tiles, ZC's map memory has a fixed size. You can have up to 16 physical maps (16x8 screens each).
• Overworlds, caves, and dungeons are virtual maps that exist at some location on a physical map. These virtual maps are called "DMaps" (short for dungeon maps). You can have up to 32 DMaps.
• Maps can be linked together by warps. There are various kinds of warps, including entrance/exit warps, cave warps, and scrolling warps.
• Screens are made up of "combos". This term is a relic of earlier versions in which combos were combinations of four 8x8 tiles. Now they just use one 16x16 tile, but they still contain other info about the block: walk flags, tile flip, block type, and extra palette info if needed.
• Each screen is limited to 256 combos, so combos are divided up into eight "pages". This means you can use a certain page of combos for overworlds, another for dungeons, another for caves, and so forth.

Palettes

• Palettes are divided up into sets of 16 colors. Some "CSets" (color sets) have specific uses.
• ZQuest lets you edit palettes and grab them from image files.
• You can set up certain colors in each CSet to be cycled.
• The ZC engine can do various fading routines.

Music

• ZC currently only supports MIDI music.
• ZQuest lets you add MIDIs to your quest and assign a different MIDI to each DMap.
• You can set the volume and loop positions of each MIDI to make them sound better in the game.

Etc. (This is getting long...)

• You can customize all kinds of things from shops to whistle warps to triforce piece positions on the subscreen.
• You can put up to 10 enemies on a screen, not including certain enemies that can be added by setting flags -- zora, rocks, traps.

What it can't do

• Well, if you think about it, there's a lot it can't do...
• It can't create new items or weapons
• ZC doesn't support music other than MIDI
• The SFX aren't customizable

Here are a few pics of ZQuest in action: