When I was bored, I came up with this interesting little program. It's a bit inefficient during the draw phase, but it's still very cool. This program loads a map file from a text document, byte per byte, and translates it into a map. It's a very neat thing to do. Unfortunately, there are some limitations. These include being limited to 10 images to be assembled (at the moment, more soon), and map size being less that 999x999. However, I won't bother to increase map size, since it takes forever to draw that many sprites. Rather than have me continue to ramble on, check out the source and included three maps. I don't suggest using map3, as it's 80 by 60, and takes forever to show up. When you start the already compiled exe, there's a basic text file browser. It starts in the maps directory, but you can type the name of listed directories (including "." and "..") to move about. It's not really useful, but still kind of cool. Pick a folder with a "map" file in it, and it will load the map. Included is map1, map2, and map3. Again, map3 is horrible on load times. None of these maps are graphically amazing, but they get the idea across. You'll need to have the 'append' DLL if you want to compile, which I included in the download for convenience. Just put it and its keywords file in the appropriate locations, just like any other DLL.

EDIT: You can open the map files in wordpad. The first two bytes of the map file are the height and width. For maps larger than 9x9, put an "x" in the height or width slot, and it will look for a file called "bin_width" or "bin_height", which can have up to three characters for the map size (examples: 10; 100; 001)

REMEMBER! These are not ".txt" files, they have no extension. They are just "map", "bin_height", and "bin_width". "bin_height" and "bin_width" aren't needed unless the width and height are greater than one byte. You can have just the width, or just the height set to "x", for maps that are 10x5 or 8x22, for example.