RLEBuilder Preview

Work on EVONE has resumed!

The RLEBuilder, EVONE's next fully graphical editor, is now sufficiently far along in the development process to show it off. The editor already has considerable functionality including live previews of all frames and animation, preview display on a color of your choice, the ability to scale the frames to any dimension, and the ability to independantly display the image and mask data for any frame.

Here are three screenshots of the editor, the first being the most interesting. (The other two show the two remaining panes of the tab control.)

(url="http://"http://www.ariossoftware.com/pub/rle/overview.jpg")http://www.ariossoft...le/overview.jpg(/url)
(url="http://"http://www.ariossoftware.com/pub/rle/frame.jpg")http://www.ariossoft...b/rle/frame.jpg(/url)
(url="http://"http://www.ariossoftware.com/pub/rle/mask.jpg")http://www.ariossoft...ub/rle/mask.jpg(/url)

Features Yet To Be Implemented
- Saving 🙂
- Bit depth changing, including a dithering algorithm.
- Frame/Mask import/export from/to a number of of different file formats.
- Automatic mask generation. (Knockout a color)
- Ability to insert/add/delete frames.
- Copy/Paste support.

Please let me know of any feature requests you have. The next editor will be the spob editor. As usual, I will not and can not predict when any of this will be complete.

------------------
(url="http://"http://www.ariossoftware.com")Arios SoftWare(/url)
(url="http://"http://www.ariossoftware.com/products/evone/")EVONE 1.0pb2 - the plugin editor for EV/EVO/EVN(/url)

(This message has been edited by AriosSw (edited 01-08-2004).)

Auto spin?

The person puts in the ship straight up then selects a function that spins it with a mask. Like MakeSpin...

------------------
Links:
(url="http://"http://forum.cjb.net:81/cgi-bin/forum.cgi?forum=unrealslair")Unreals Fourms(/url) (url="http://"http://www.unrealslair.cjb.net/")Unreals Lair(/url) (url="http://"mailto:unrealslair@unrealslair.cjb.net")mailto:unrealslair@unrealslair.cjb.net(/url)unrealslair@unrealslair.cjb.net

Well, for the next update, you should put some of that RLE rendering capability into the spďn editor. It looks good so far!

Here's a suggestion- have simple tools (select, pencil, bucket, brush) for frame corrections. This could be useful in fixing errors where the edge of the ship's mask is touching the edge of the frame, which seems to screw things up quite a bit. Additionally, if you brush, bucket, or pencil in the background color anywhere, it should blacken the corresponding pixel in the mask, and if you use a different color, it should whiten the corresponding pixel.

Keep up the good work!

------------------
Eat blazing electric death!

Quote

Originally posted by The Cheat:
**Auto spin?

The person puts in the ship straight up then selects a function that spins it with a mask. Like MakeSpin...

**

Thats not possible with 3/4th view sprites, and flat sprites look like someone stepped on them

Space Pirate: EVNEW seems to be able to make RLEs where the pixels on the edge are non-transparent. I do not know how it does it, though.
-Az

------------------
It is here. EVNEW Public Beta (url="http://"http://www.aznt.com/EVN/EVNEW")www.aznt.com/EVN/EVNEW(/url)
Stuffit is a piece of .sit.

I'm just curious, but where did you get the information on the RLE data format and on how to read and write it? I would be flattered if it were from the EVNEW source code. Of course, you don't have to tell me if you don't want to.

------------------
Get (url="http://"http://www.aznt.com/EVN/EVNEW")EVNEW(/url) - the free, open-source EVN plugin Editor for Windows!

Quote

Originally posted by Aprosenf:
I'm just curious, but where did you get the information on the RLE data format and on how to read and write it? I would be flattered if it were from the EVNEW source code. Of course, you don't have to tell me if you don't want to.

Using SpriteWorld, most likely. Maybe he got information from that shado83 person who created an editor that I haven't seen anything on since the beta tester topic (try searching for "NovaLord" and you'll find a topic giving the basics of the RLE format).

------------------
The programmer's code of entomology: there's always another bug.
Windows users: stop asking for plugins. (url="http://"http://www.aznt.com/EVN/EVNEW/")Make one yourself.(/url)
(url="http://"http://www.cwssoftware.com")Sephil Saga Website(/url)

Quote

Originally posted by orcaloverbri9:
**Using SpriteWorld, most likely. Maybe he got information from that shado83 person who created an editor that I haven't seen anything on since the beta tester topic (try searching for "NovaLord" and you'll find a topic giving the basics of the RLE format).

**

Indeed, he got the source code from SpriteWorld. Remember, EVONE was out well before either EVNEW or NovaLord/God were started, and he used RLEs in they system editor.

I wonder what happened to Shado's project...

------------------
Eat blazing electric death!

Quote

Originally posted by orcaloverbri9:
**Using SpriteWorld, most likely. Maybe he got information from that shado83 person who created an editor that I haven't seen anything on since the beta tester topic (try searching for "NovaLord" and you'll find a topic giving the basics of the RLE format).

**

You could get almost as much information as there is there by simply searching for posts by Aprosenf that mentioned RLE. His post on the issue with the 04 opcode not supported in EVN comes to mind.
I was never aware that there had been another program capable of encoding RLES. Prehapse this explains a mystery... I wonder if Bryce Shroeder, the person who released the graphics from his canceled TC that were full of strange RLE's that didnt seem to read right, made his RLE's with a beta/alpha version of NovaLord? Aprosenf, Remember all those strange RLE's i sent you that didnt work early on? They were all from the same person's collection of graphics, and i could never figure out how he was the only one who seemed to churn out these non-standard RLEs. Even DeRLE choked on some of them.
-Az

------------------
It is here. EVNEW Public Beta (url="http://"http://www.aznt.com/EVN/EVNEW")www.aznt.com/EVN/EVNEW(/url)
Stuffit is a piece of .sit.

That's not too surprising. I got the information myself from the SpriteWorld source. Thank god the guy who did that used meaningful variable names and constant names. Yes, I remember those swNova graphics. They were pretty good if you ask me.

------------------
Get (url="http://"http://www.aznt.com/EVN/EVNEW")EVNEW(/url) - the free, open-source EVN plugin Editor for Windows!

Quote

Originally posted by Aprosenf:
**That's not too surprising. I got the information myself from the SpriteWorld source. Thank god the guy who did that used meaningful variable names and constant names. Yes, I remember those swNova graphics. They were pretty good if you ask me.

**

Some of them were great graphics. But they were encoded in a way that did strange things to programs trying to read them.
-Az

EDIT: Come on, Az! "did strange things to things"!? Whats next, "Well, the thing did strange things to the other things 'cause of that other stuff with that thing"? smacks self
------------------
It is here. EVNEW Public Beta (url="http://"http://www.aznt.com/EVN/EVNEW")www.aznt.com/EVN/EVNEW(/url)
Stuffit is a piece of .sit.

(This message has been edited by Azratax2 (edited 01-09-2004).)

As an interesting side-note, Dr. Ralph made us a special one-off "oversized" shän so that we could view and manipulate the Raven shän (which can't be properly viewed otherwise.

Dave @ ATMOS

Wow, I am actually surprised at the number of responses this generated 🙂

I will look into a pencil/brush tool, but I don't really want to turn it into a graphics editor.

EVONE uses the latest release of SpriteWorld for all its graphics and RLE work. I have been using SW in assorted apps for over 4 years so it was the perfect choice. I have written a number of custom routines to do some of the more advanced stuff, including scaling the sprite.

Anders Bjorklund is the incredible programmer who wrote the RLE portions of SW.

------------------
(url="http://"http://www.ariossoftware.com")Arios SoftWare(/url)
(url="http://"http://www.ariossoftware.com/products/evone/")EVONE 1.0pb2 - the plugin editor for EV/EVO/EVN(/url)

(This message has been edited by AriosSw (edited 01-09-2004).)

Quote

Originally posted by The Cheat:
**Auto spin?

The person puts in the ship straight up then selects a function that spins it with a mask. Like MakeSpin...

**

Like Aztratax2 said, that's silly with 3/4 sprites. The easiest way to make the different angles is to do it in your modelling program by spinning the ship around. That way you get changes in the shadows that make it look like the ship is turning for real. It's part of the beauty of 3D modelling.

People think it's hard cause it's impressive. The program does more work than I do, I think. 🙂

Quote

Originally posted by Azratax2:
EDIT: Come on, Az! "did strange things to things"!? Whats next, "Well, the thing did strange things to the other things 'cause of that other stuff with that thing"? smacks self

You know what words like "thing" are called? This is a real mouthfull, they're metasyntactical variables. Gotta love that eh? 😄

~A~

------------------
"How can I make it go faster?" -Me-

Quote

You know what words like "thing" are called? This is a real mouthfull, they're metasyntactical variables. Gotta love that eh?

Hmm.

Thing. (1 syllable)

Metasyntactical Variable. (10 syllables)

Total wasted time saying "metasyntactical variable" instead of "thing": ~2 seconds

Total wasted time posting this: ~2 minutes

------------------
To quote a pillar of American society: D'OH!