Duck and Cover

Edited as Red is now with us.(Your mail adress was here! )

Damn you Flamescreen! When I read the subject line, I thought it was done or something and you were posting a link to it!

i know! it was soooo deceiving. anyway, red's been working hard (i think) but he came out with the new sprite viewer instead of making the sprite editor. i didn't even know he was working on a tile editor. i guess that would be something to look forward to.

Sorry Max , in any case though this is the place I'm gonna post various things about it so I had to keep his e-mail.
About the sprite viewer instead of editor, it's supposed to be this way cause he didn't get the attention he wanted. Hm, perhaps we should start a petition.
WarBringer if you search a bit the old DAC you'll find we talked about it on numerous occasions. I'm referring to it as .til editor there. Odin was the first to reveal such a project existed.
Btw, I just e-mailed him asking about the basic tile editor's abilities. If I have a respond before logging out, you will see it here.

I talked to Red early last week and his new viewer should have a few extras. I had it downloaded somewhere - hopefully not on my home machine before the crash. I also talked to Domin about a few improvements to Spray and he seemed willing to make a few tweaks. The main thing may be the inclusion of a visual representation of the bounding box. This is sorely missing in the original and helps to correctly make scenery sprites.

Great news! Thanks for the attempts JJ86. I thought Domin left forever the FoT community. Eager for Spray 2.0! (Hope they include thumbs up icons in the process, in New DAC, wanted to include one but couldn't)
Btw, can you provide a link for this new Sprite Viewer, or is it the same with the last link you provided on old DAC?
Also, i hope that doesn't mean he abandoned the FoTTE project!

Well, he gave me a link but it isn't for immediate release - so you may have to wait. I lost his original viewer along with everything else on my HD so if anyone else has a copy could they share?

With Red's newest release he will have a save feature, but I haven't looked at the file yet so I don't know what that entails.

Also here is some info he gave me about shadows:

> I also was wondering, maybe you know about how a shadow is created in-game
from a sprite. I have made several scenery sprites with Spray but they do
not project a shadow like the ones in the game. Is that something in the
sprite definition that should be added in Spray?

Well, the way the shadow works is that it uses a special colour (a bit like
the transparant colour in GIFs), which gets attributed as the transparancy
colour. In fact since you automatically know the colour of the shadow, you
only need to stare it's alpha values (thus saving a bit more space). So to
design something properly (with Spray for example), you'd need to make sure
to use a unique shade (preferably of very dark gray), and then fiddle with
it's alpha value. Save it in the RAW format, and have Spray be able to take
a parameter to choose the "Shadow" colour, which when found would be used in
place of the normal alpha RLE code. Note that this is especially annoying
when reducing the image's depth to paletized 256colours, as it means that
you should probably wait to do the 'shadow layer' AFTER the depth has been
modified, to avoid the shadow colour changing and/or dithering.

I don't have access to my computer right now but checking old DAC for the link you provided. Keep looking in here and I think I can provide it.
Here is the basic part of it the rest gives me an error when trying to access it(http://www.terra-arcanum.com/~tms/artic ... e=Programs)

I looked there last week and it wasn't available anymore.

If you want, PM me your e-mail and I should be able to send it in a couple of days. I have it somewhere in my HD.

Any news of Red lately? Is he going to do that Tile editor after all? Is it going to be part of the sprite viewer? He never did reply to my e-mail...

Good news! He just told me its almost done, in FoT Forum! Now i can start making dreams of possible Blue water tiles among else. Red if you read this, will I be able to import sprites to it?

Oh crap... You just reminded me of another part that's missing... Importing images...

Right now I envision 3 ways to import:

• Import images in the same format as Spray (might as well get along, huh?)
• Import images directly from ZAR (this is the easyest for me, and will come first - you'd convert them through FO:T Editor)
• Import from sprites. Note that in such a case, you'd only be able to import a SINGLE layer. Remember that most sprites have 4 layers (the major exception being items)

Did I answer you in FoT, and not in this forum? That's weird as I don't remember browsing the FoT forum.

I think importing the same way as Spray would be best. That way alpha channels will be preserved. I don't think they work with zar format or do they? I think Spray's method of importing images could be improved.

Well, I don't know if it does properly, but ZARs support it, yes.

I know, I need to make a ZAR saver myself, but I'm a bit lazy...

In any case, what I mentioned still holds.

Well the Tactics editor has a separate module for converting png to zar.

Raw and Act(as Spray) seems fine to me also.
If PNG(to Zar) retains these sort of info, fine also.