THE JOHN JONES INTERVIEW
Copyright 2001 www.tombraiderchronicles.com

[ January 6th 2001 ]

John Jones has done what programmers have been thumbing pencils and tappings keys over ever since the Core release of the Chronicles Level Editor, he's released a Texure Editor for Level Editor users, enabling them to convert custom designed bitmaps for use within their playable levels.

John stopped by and had this to say about his Texture Editor.

What motivated you to compile the editor ?

It was basically due to the lack of a program that would assist in the creation of textures with the Level Editor. For a while I used Windows Paint to select the tiles I wanted to use in my own levels. This can become very tedious and a mistake in lining up the tiles can lead to the whole texture set being useless and not looking right within the game. Plus the fact that it would take a couple hours work to create a set started me thinking. I mean the two hours spent making the set meant two hours not working on the level you wanted. Because none of the drawing packages I used offered the facility I wanted to use I started looking through the read me files provided with my copy of visual basic to see if there was any way of accomplishing the task I wanted to do.

Well there was and the program came into being after around four days work on programming it. I must thank John Dodis though for providing the crucial one line piece of code I needed, without which the program would have never been completed. Also I must admit that another motivation was so that I could have something on my site which would hopefully attract visitors. The Save Game Editors had all been done along with just about everything else so this was the most original thing I could think of to provide to Tomb Raider fans without being seen as stealing somebody else's idea.

How did you get into Tomb Raider ?

To cut a long story short I first meet Lara on the PlayStation back in 1995 at a visit to my uncles. I didn't like the look of the game, I wasn't used to the 3rf person perspective, preferring to stick with my Mario instead. It wasn't until around three months later that I realised the power of the PlayStation for its time so I bought one dropping Lara for Crash Bandicoot instead. Don't laugh the first Crash was really worth a play. Anyway basically because I had ever only seen the first level I got a hold of the demo which featured the second level and I fell in love with the game. The web site developed out of the fact that I got stuck and none of the walkthroughs at the time did anything to help. So after solving the first game I went back and wrote what I wanted to be a decent walkthrough. My friends and family thought it was useful and so I stuck it on the internet in 96 at the time when I was learning how to use and program for it. And here we end up where we are today.

What is the future of Texture Edit ?

There's been some interest in the program so I've started to look into features I can add into the program. Nothing to major that will make it unusable but adding support for reading gif and jpg files and the like. Fixing errors and streamlining the code. I wouldn't expect any major update to the program for around three months but I am working on a tutorial and manual that will accompany it.

Finally, who is John Jones ?

At the moment I'm a student studying for my computer related qualifications that will hopefully some day set me up in a paid job. Until then I'm left with some spare time in which I work on my web site and I now and then do a bit of programming windows applications.

My site www.3dactionplanet.com/tombraider normally gets the priority of my tasks which is why I haven't written a program before for it