Topic: Scene Manipulation and Rendering Tools

[Troy Lundin]

Updated Tagger to Beta 5 [29OCT12]. I added the ability to use custom fonts. With this modification, the program is still not ready for an actual release.

Custom Fonts can be created right in the program itself, or compatible font bitmaps can be imported. Fonts used in the program are saved in the map file so they don't need to be transferred with the program. I included three font bitmaps so you can see the format and try them out. Included are Dialog and Menu fonts for Dawn of Souls and a font for Golden Sun: The Lost Age.

What's next? Custom border and some gradient filling. We'll see. Any QoL features you'd like to see? Let me know.

[Troy Lundin]

http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?5kaeudapwewyw1i

Tagger updated to Beta 6. Fixed crucial bugs that prevent fonts from loading in Beta 5. The save files are still valid, they just didn't load correctly.

Changelog:

Code: [Select]

Beta 6 (02 NOV 2012)
 - Improved initial load times marginally.
 - Increased draw speed by ~5400%. You read that correctly, 54 times faster. :D
 - Property editing is much more efficient. Performance may increase on slower computers.
 - Changed highlighting to yellow outline with tranparent yellow fill.
 - Fixed bug that would cause a tag's line height to reset when changing fonts.
 - Fixed critical error that would cause custom fonts to not load from a saved file.
 - Integrated Font Creator into the Font Viewer.

 Font Viewer
  - Allows viewing, editing or creation of fonts.
  - Existing font may be added, removed, renamed or even exported.
  - Font editing is only available in a manual capacity.
    Automatic comes when I can figure out a decent enough algorithm to detect characters.

 Tag Editor
  - Implemented custom z-ordering. Simply drag nodes around in the treeview.
  - Completely rewrote tag handling code. Now more efficient.
  - Multi-select is more robust, handling multi-tag editing more easily.

[TerraEsperZ]

Troy Lundin, I finally tried SMRT after managing to understand how to find the evA, evB and evY values in the I/O Viewer and the results are amazing! It makes me a lot for confident if I ever need to do Alpha Blending for a GBA game in the future, and if I ever find the time, to go back and redo the transparencies in Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow correctly.

You rock my friend !

[Troy Lundin]

Well, well, well...

I haven't been here for quite some time, though I have been hard at work making amazing programs.

SMRT has been updated quite a bit since I last posted here. I might have to release the latest revision. Also, do you mean you entered the evA, evB and evY values in manually? Because the program should be able to find the values automatically.

Well, now that I think of it, attaching to a process is tricky. It really only works with a specific release of VBA. Anywho, my latest creation is an image compressor. It's coming along quite well, if I do say so myself. I took a certain image from this site (https://www.vgmaps.com/Atlas/SuperNES/Lufia&TheFortressOfDoom-World.png) and compressed it like a champ. Here are the results:

Code: [Select]

Format                                      Filesize (in bytes)
Bitmap (32bpp):                                      20,972,598
PNG (PNGGauntlet, best settings, OptiPNG, DeflOpt)      998,629
PNG (7z, LZMA2, Ultra)                                  957,710
BMP (7z, LZMA2, Ultra)                                  254,217
pimanip (Tile Sequence algorithm)                        35,377
My program is the bottom one. Quite significant indeed. On a side note, why is the font size of the code tag so small?

[Revned]

Great numbers! However, the problem with custom image formats is lack of support. It's unlikely that casual users would download your program just to look at a map. Maybe it would be useful if you could tie it into one of those Google Maps-like viewers, though.

[Maxim]

Some years ago I wrote such a viewer as a Java applet - although of course nobody uses them any more - and it was similarly compressy, but slow to draw when the tile size is small and when zoomed out. These days you could try to do it in Javascript. I also played a bit with PanoJS which doesn't serve the same file for identical tiles, but does end up smaller even with the multiple zoom levels due to better local similarly in each image file.