Path: chuka.playstation.co.uk!news From: Chris Chadwick Newsgroups: scee.yaroze.freetalk.english Subject: Cool tools (long post!) Date: Fri, 08 Aug 1997 00:37:34 -0700 Organization: PlayStation Net Yaroze (SCEE) Lines: 74 Message-ID: <33EACCBE.4596@dial.pipex.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: an128.du.pipex.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 2.02 (Win95; I; 16bit) Hi all, Now that yaroze has been out here for a few months, I was just wondering what development tools people have settled down with and would recommend (PC). Myself, I suspect like many others, had the black, magic box delivered with a copy of CodeWarrior which I struggled with for several weeks until I could stand the buggy interface no more. The straw that broke the camels back was when I heard that the code it produced was significantly slower than that of GNU development. Nuff said! I dropped it quicker than a hot stone... That's not to say I won't go back to CodeWarrior sometime in the future when/if it proves it's worth - at least MetroWerks are trying to offer an alternative which is a good thing, I s'pose. The editor I use now is PFE (Programmer's File Editor). Don't let the prosaic name put you off (I wonder if the programmer thought it up :) , I've found it a God send since mourning the passing of CW: it comes in 32- and 16-bit flavours for windows, you can run your makefile and SIOCONS by the press of a toolbar button, has multiple file editing, brill preferences setup, turn line numbers on/off at the press of a button (great for tracking back through source code when compiling/linking throws up an error line num :), templates, special C features (e.g. auto brace alignment) etc, etc... Only downside: no debugger, of course! Perhaps this is a well known editor (?) but I stumbled across it on an FTP site somewhere. Oh yeah, I almost forgot the best bit... it's *FREEWARE* ;) Anyone interested, then go: http://www.lancs.ac.uk/people/cpaap/pfe/ (tip: dont be put off by the default, chunky font; this is easily changed to the neat, skinny courier one) Anyway, on to graphics creation: I wont bore you with *all* I have to go through to create sprite animation frames etc., but suffice it to say, it involves a home-made graphics editor, a *screen grabber*, a re-boot, sometimes colour depth conversion (which corrupts the colours most of the time), TIM conversion, TimTool... phew! I'm thinking theres got to be an easier/quicker way than this! I have Neopaint (useful *sometimes*); I've tried shareware Paint Shop Pro (not very impressed) and also a trial of the - I believe - popular Adobe Photoshop. This interested me particularly because of the pluggin available from Yaroze web site which lets you work directly using the TIM file format (I think)... Then I saw the price: approx £400! :O Whats the deal with this? is it *really* worth getting? Is there anything that would allow me to test sprite frame animation is 'working' as expected from within the app (as my home-made jobby does)? Any help/info appreciated! As for 3D, TMD generation, I haven't started trying any 3D stuff yet (I feel like I'm standing at the foot of a rather steep hill :( ) so I cant comment on available tools. Besides, I still have a great affection for sprite-based games (spot the cop-out due to crap math skills :) - A *huge* majority of my all time favourite games are sprite-filled! I digress (I've always wanted to say that!), I understand 3D Studio and equivalents are also several hundred pounds... This is turning out to be *one* expensive hobby! Enough for now. Any comments welcome! Cheers Chris