Exit points

What's the easiest way to input the weapon exit points?

I'm on a Mac, and neither Resilla or Mission Computer have an interface for this.
I've been opening a ship frame in Photoshop, setting the ruler to pixels, setting zeros to the center of the frame, then looking at the cursor x,y location, and recording the results. Then taking those results to enter into a plug editor.

As you can imagine, this is quite a pain.
Is there a different utility I can use?

Easiest? Make them all (0,0,0).

(/snide off)

You could use an emulator (SheepShaver, Basilisk, etc.) to run Mac OS 9 or earlier, and use ResEdit with NovaTools.

Also, if all your sprites are rendered at the same angle, they should all have comparable y-compression. Then you could make a spreadsheet where you input the dimensions of a sprite, the number of frames per rotation, and the coordinates of the desired exit points that you choose for the first frame. It would automatically calculate the exit points for all the other frames. Could get tricky if you're using z-coordinates much, but the math is just basic linear algebra.

This post has been edited by Qaanol : 06 October 2009 - 10:53 AM

I agree with Qaanol; ResEdit/Nova Tools is the way to go. It takes some getting used to, but past that the only real problem I've run into is that sprites that are very large (I think 300x300 or bigger) don't entirely display in the shän editor – anything outside the display gets cropped.

Still though it's a great shän editor. Plus Word Of God says that MissionComputer may be getting a comparable shän editor in the near future so you wouldn't have to run an emulator.

I stopped using NovaTools when I couldn't run OS 9 apps anymore.

I hadn't realized that an emulator was released.

What you should do is download a program called lateral game maker which you can download here:

http://www.ismavatar.com/lgm/download.php

The best thing about is that it's a java applet so it's compatible with mac and windows. but what you want to do is run the program, then create a sprite resource open it up and load the image of your ship pointing up. Then you want to click center on origin to give you the center of your sprite. Pretend those coordinates are 0,0 as this will give you the coordinates for your exit points to enter into your plug editor (i.e. say your image is 60 by 60 pixels after you center it you will have 30 by 30 the top left is positive horizontal and positive vertical top right is negative horizontal and positive vertical vice-versa for the bottom two. So if your gun exit point is 20 by 20 you would subtract your center coordinates by those numbers and enter them into your plug editor, if your coordinates are 40 by 20 you subtract the x value by your center x value and input that into the plug editor as a negative value. Then you just repeat as necessary).

I hope this helps and that I didn't explain it in a very vague and complex way, but it is very easy and simple to do and works with an image of any size so you can use it to get exit points for ships larger than 300 by 300

This sounds like what I'm already doing in Photoshop.
Does this have an additional advantage you haven't described?

QUOTE (Desprez @ Oct 17 2009, 07:02 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

This sounds like what I'm already doing in Photoshop.
Does this have an additional advantage you haven't described?

It doesn't take nearly as long as photoshop to boot up and load stuff :3. It can also create spritesheets and gif animations