Jet Set Willy Construction Kit (JSW CK) is an editor for Matthew Smith's classic Jet Set Willy, which I acknowledge as being the copyright of copyright of Software Projects (1984), seeing as it has been added to the TAP-files for convenience.
I used JSW CK to write all my JSW games up to 2004's Party Willy (except Jet Set Dizzy and the old Jet Set Willy: Manic Miner, which were written using JSW CK's predecessor: the slow and incomplete Jet Set Willy Screen Editor, which could literally only edit rooms (i.e. 49152-65535 or #C000-FFFF)).
The reason I wrote JSW CK, despite the existence of other JSW-editors on the Internet, is that I did all my MM/JSW development on a real Spectrum +2 rather than on an emulator (until it broke in April 2003), and the challenge of writing my own editor was much more appealing than the tedium of typing an editor from the Internet into my real Spectrum.
It also means that, as the author of JSW CK, it's easy for me to modify it or extend it. I started work on JSW CK in summer 1997, and it was essentially complete by spring 1999, when it was solid enough to complete my JSW games We Pretty and Jet Set Willy: The Lord of the Rings.
JSW CK is written predominantly in BASIC, but has several machine-code routines to perform expensive operations such as screen-drawing and look-ups in the blink of an eye.
From playing briefly with the other Spectrum-based JSW-editors (of which the best two seem to be JetSet Editor and JSW Editor MkII), it seems that JSW CK has the advantages of a better user-interface: it has more shortcuts, and you never have to go through a sequence of inputs all over again if you want to change one thing.
Above all, the way JSW CK handles guardian-classes and guardian-instances is superb – you can either access the guardian-class table via the guardian-instances in rooms, or browse the guardian-class table and look up all instances of a guardian-class across all rooms.
JSW CK also has capabilities that other Spectrum-based JSW-editors do not appear to have – for example, you can edit the length of a rope, and you can specify the vertical position of a horizontal guardian in pixels, not just characters.
I would appreciate feedback from anyone who is more familiar with the other JSW-editors and has something to add about the relative advantages and disadvantages of JSW CK, or indeed any other suggestions as to how I could improve or extend JSW CK.
Update (26th October 2009): I have reissued Jet Set Willy Construction Kit. I have proofread, edited and updated README.TXT and USER.TXT; the TAP-files are completely unchanged.
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By downloading Jet Set Willy Construction Kit, you agree to respect my copyright-policy.
Changing the border-colour shall only alter the 3 least significant bits of Offset 222 (#DE), to respect variants of the JSW engine such as JSW128 and Geoff Mode that use the other bits (JSW CK v1.0 simply pokes the new border-colour into Offset 222).
Similar considerations may apply to guardian-class definitions, although the required changes are more complicated, and won't be made until a possible major new version to support JSW128 and Geoff Mode in the future.
Some cosmetic bugs in the Guardian-Class Editor shall be fixed:
the PAPER bug when you edit the colour of a guardian in a non-black room;
bidirectional horizontal guardians walking properly on the guardian-class screen;
the correct sprite-frame appearing in the guardian-class path editor.
There is a bug in the Item Editor: sometimes, when you move an item, a space appears behind it when there's actually something there – but this bug may be too expensive to fix if it would require keeping track of what's underneath every item (all 256 items could be in one room, and even in the same cell, so it would need a 256x256 buffer to keep track!).
Filling a whole row or column with Air/Water/Earth/Fire at once.
'0' to input the length of a ramp/conveyor.
Changing a guardian-instance's position in the Guardian-Instance List using CAPS-SHIFT & '8' for down, CAPS-SHIFT & '9' for up.
Copying a room to another room, or exchanging two rooms, with the option of copying or moving the items in those rooms.
Saving/loading an individual room (with the option of saving the items in that room), guardian-class, sprite-page or single 16x16 sprite (to tape only, due to the problem of running out of silicon-disc space).
bidirectional/unidirectional player-sprites in Geoff Mode (the 2 most significant bits of Offset 222);
lives-counter in Geoff Mode (Offset 223);
patch-vector in Geoff Mode (just the address (Offsets 238/239) – JSW CK shall not attempt to be an assembler! ).
Detect the Block-Graphics Bug (aka Cell-Graphics Bug).
Major additional functionality
Editing the general setup (start-room, Willy's start-position, position and colour of Maria and the toilet, colour of foot and barrel on Game Over screen, cheat-modes, &c.). This will require the addition of a Part III.
The new guardian-types in Geoff Mode (fast horizontal guardians, wraparound guardians, &c.). Currently, JSW CK falls over if you try to edit the guardians of a Geoff Mode game. ;-(
Editing the title-screen colour-attributes (and the four 8x8 graphics used on the title screen), the title-screen scrolly, the score-bar colour-attributes and the score-bar text.
).