tUME screenshot showing an in progress image for the game "Mick and MAck as the Global Gladiators on Sega Genesis |
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| Developer(s) | Echidna |
|---|---|
| Operating system | MS-DOS, AmigaOS |
| Type | Tile-based map editor |
| License | Mozilla Public License v1.1 |
| Website | tUME Homepage |
tUME (the Universal Map Editor) is a tile based map editor originally created and designed by Greg Marquez (aka Richard G. Marquez) and Gregg Tavares for the Commodore Amiga and later ported to MS-DOS by Dan Chang. It was used to create levels, maps, stages and tables for many 8-bit and 16-bit console games for the Nintendo Entertainment System, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, the Game Boy and the Sega Genesis.
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tUME distinguished itself from other map editors of the era in several ways. One, it copied the keyboard layout of Deluxe Paint, the most popular image editing software at the time.
It has no intrinsic limits. It can edit multiple maps, each made from tiles of any arbitrary pixel size. It can even make maps made from tiles of tiles of arbitrary size nested to an arbitrary level.
It supports editing multiple maps at once (or rooms as tUME calls them). It also allows an arbitrary number of layers per map allowing tiles to be stacked.
Another unique feature was that it features no graphic editing tools. Most map editors of the era had internal pixel editing tools for creating the actual tiles used. tUME instead relied on external applications like Deluxe Paint realizing it could never hope to compete with all the tools available in specialized pixel editing packages.
Finally, whereas most map editors of the era saved out proprietary formats intended to be used directly in a game, tUME saved a generic IFF format file and then relied on customized converters called tUMEPack(s). These tools would take the various graphics, maps, layers and based on various settings create all kinds of data including not only the graphics but things like height maps for collisions, logic mappings to map an image to a certain meaning internal to a game's logic, replacements for when areas of a map needed to be replaced at runtime during a game and many other types of data.
tUME was widely used throughout the industry. Games that used tUME include