Path: chuka.playstation.co.uk!news From: alex@teeth.demon.co.uk (Alex Amsel) Newsgroups: scee.yaroze.freetalk.english Subject: Re: Cool tools (long post!) Date: Fri, 08 Aug 1997 15:37:53 GMT Organization: Into Beyond Lines: 74 Message-ID: <33eb359a.9289604@news.playstation.co.uk> References: <33EACCBE.4596@dial.pipex.com> Reply-To: alex@teeth.demon.co.uk NNTP-Posting-Host: teeth.demon.co.uk Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Newsreader: Forte Agent .99g/32.335 On Fri, 08 Aug 1997 00:37:34 -0700, Chris Chadwick did quoth at me: >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 If you can afford it then buy Codewright. Otherwise I have to admit I am quite happy using UltraEdit - I don't like auto expansion and suchlike, and UE is very quick to use and becoming more configurable as time goes by. It is shareware rather than a full commercial product. >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! !!! Get an old Amiga and use DPaint or Brilliance. Failing that just use an old copy of DPaint on the PC (like many commercial artists still do - we looked into doing a commercial replacement a couple of times...). Photoshop is brilliant at effects and working with layers is very useful indeed, but for basic pixel editing forget it. I don't think it's palette handling is too hot regarding games dev. I use PSP for my batch conversions, and for TIM stuff we sometimes create our own. Especially if several frames make up an anim - a quick tool we have puts the frames together in whatever row/column mix you want and stores the data as appropriate (not tim which isn't needed anyway). >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! 3DS is pretty awful for beginners too. 3dsmax is better. I'd go for LW or perhaps Imagine (can't remember if any mags have given older versions away recently). Write your own TMD converters so you don't have to lose all the texture information as that is an incredible pain in the arse. >Enough for now. Any comments welcome! Well I just hit another real odd bug - I use extensive logging facilites so I know exactly what is being loaded, where, when, what functions have been run, line numbers and file numbers, etc. But after changing my compiler setup a little sometimes printf would stop working on the ps-x. Then sometimes my code would stop at really obscure places. After almost 6 hours messing, I changed my batch file setup and no more problems. Still, I did finally get round to checking where all the variables are stored and how much stack space is generally available etc. I had to check for memory trashes so checked over the stack info too. Regards, Alex Amsel + Tuna Technologies + Windows 95/NT, Console and Internet + + The PC/PS-X Game Tools and Game Development Specialists + + Flibbley flobble wab tiggle sa lable ly pibbley Obblers +