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ArthurDent
Dark Lord

Joined: 25 May 2002
Location: Greece
Posts: 408

Posted: 02 August 2006 at 11:33 \| IP Logged

UPDATE: Scroll to the bottom of the thread for link to latest Version (Build 128)

Hello all,

- TheDark Graphics Version 2 is available here.

- Version 2 (TDG2.exe) replaces TDG Versions 1.x completely.

- No effort has been spared on making Version 2 faster as ever before to support users with older computers.

- See the included on-line help file for instructions on use etc. You can use F1 to display the Help file during program execution.

Regards,

ArthurDent

Edited by ArthurDent on 07 November 2008 at 21:26

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mague
Dark Spawn

Joined: 05 February 2006
Location: Hungary
Posts: 52

Posted: 02 August 2006 at 15:21 \| IP Logged

This is great!

The whole interface changed, and there is a help file too :PP

Thanks a lot for your efforts!

You are the best, ArthurDent! :P

Update: How could you make it so quick? The big cel files' loading time is less then a sec! This is amazig!!! :PPP

Edited by mague on 02 August 2006 at 15:26

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Quelex
Dark Spawn

Joined: 03 January 2005
Location: United States
Posts: 95

Posted: 02 August 2006 at 18:10 \| IP Logged

Simply amazing. Great work.

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ArthurDent
Dark Lord

Joined: 25 May 2002
Location: Greece
Posts: 408

Posted: 03 August 2006 at 09:01 \| IP Logged

Hello all,

-Well, it didn't take long for the first bug to appear. Nothing surprising since Version 2 is a complete rewrite .

-Version 2 maintenance release (Build 101) is available here.

-Changes:

FIX: The palette colours displayed incorrectly when right-clicking on Palette Window with a TRN file(s) active and/or after manually changing Active Colour(s). This was only a display issue.
NEW: Using Ctrl-Right-Click and Ctrl-Shift-Right-Click on the displayed image in the Main Window will advance animation to Last/First Frame. Updated Help File.

Regards,

ArthurDent

Edited by ArthurDent on 03 August 2006 at 12:42

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ArthurDent
Dark Lord

Joined: 25 May 2002
Location: Greece
Posts: 408

Posted: 03 August 2006 at 13:30 \| IP Logged

Hello all,

-Some more minor display issues are corrected/redesigned.

-Version 2 maintenance release (Build 102) is available here.

-Changes:

FIX: Opening a new PAL file caused all Active Colours to disappear. This was only a display issue.
NEW: On certain occasions Persistence automatically expires. Redesigned the behavior of the Persist checkbox accordingly. Updated Help File.

Regards,

ArthurDent

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ArthurDent
Dark Lord

Joined: 25 May 2002
Location: Greece
Posts: 408

Posted: 11 August 2006 at 21:03 \| IP Logged

Hello all,

-Version 2 maintenance release (Build 103) is available here.

-Changes:

FIX: On certain - rare - occasions, when changing Active Colours with certain Base TRN and/or Leader TRN loaded resulted in more Active Colours being changed to the new colour than just the selected Active Colour.
NEW: Added a Help <?> Button.

Regards,

ArthurDent

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trimayne
Dark Spawn

Joined: 10 June 2004
Location: Austria
Posts: 260

Posted: 22 August 2006 at 15:01 \| IP Logged

Hello there,

As I've recently returned to my 'CL2 - Grouped CEL'-Conversion Project I've at first considered it quite impressive, that all those batch-conversions do happen that quick now, but by the time I had finished my first conversion (CL2 to BMP, BMP to Single Frame CEL & SF CEL to Grouped MF CEL), which was about 10 seconds later, I had to realise, that the original order of the frames wasn't maintained... several tests brought to light, that the order was already ignored at the CL2 to BMP batch-conversion, more precisely that means, that inbetween an animation of a certain position (let's assume it's the bottom-view [wouldn't know how to describe that in a better way] one), frames of the following position are inserted (bottom left) and then the previous position-animation continues [it's not that minor, but yeah... that should do as an example], that's why, when considering that some animations do consist of more than 20 frames per position, the output is rendered more or less non-usable, since trying to restore the order would nearly take as long as a single-frame conversion.

I've downloaded the final build of the 1.2 release as a temporary alternative, but there again... the batch-conversion doesn't deliver the intended result..

Could you supply me with an older release, so that I can check, if only the BMP-Batch-Conversion is flawed?

I would be deeply grateful, if you could, because I do not really care for some extra-time in the batch-process, as long as I don't have to stick to the single-frame-conversion again I'm totally satisfied...

With kind regards,

Trimayne

Edited by trimayne on 22 August 2006 at 15:33

ArthurDent
Dark Lord

Joined: 25 May 2002
Location: Greece
Posts: 408

Posted: 22 August 2006 at 23:12 \| IP Logged

Hello all,

- Good job to Trimayne on catching this.

- Version 2 maintenance release (Build 104) is available here.

-Changes:

FIX: Grouped CEL creation did not work correctly when Group amount and Frames per Group amount were not the same.
NEW: Added "Import Palette from BMP file" capability. Updated Help File.

Regards,

ArthurDent

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trimayne
Dark Spawn

Joined: 10 June 2004
Location: Austria
Posts: 260

Posted: 23 August 2006 at 02:57 \| IP Logged

...and I've considered receiving an older release quite a good idea

Thanks a lot for this flawlessly-working update, Arthur!

With best regards,

Trimayne

Edited by trimayne on 23 August 2006 at 02:58

Ychiju
Dark Servant

Joined: 09 September 2005
Posts: 34

Posted: 24 August 2006 at 16:25 \| IP Logged

Hi,
I was wondering, if it is possible or could be made possible, that you can resize images with TDG, so that you won't have to resize all images from a frameset with MS Paint?
Anyway, I have to say, that your tool is one of the most useful device in the world of Diablo.

mague
Dark Spawn

Joined: 05 February 2006
Location: Hungary
Posts: 52

Posted: 09 October 2006 at 13:44 \| IP Logged

Hello Arthur.

I get "Run-time error '13': Type mismatch error", whenever I try to batch convert something.

It turned out that if my directory or one of the dirs in the path is longer then 8 characters, TDG will crash with this message.
Example: "D:\Diablo\7hun_char\FULL_medtexts_55"

UPDATE1: well, not the long directory name is the case. But the _ character in the dir name! And it only happens, when batch convert is enabled. Maybe TDG looks for the first _ character in the full path, to find the frame index in the file name (blabla_1 ; blabla_2)?

UPDATE2: i tried to do the following:
- convert medtexts.cel into separate bmp files (55 frame)

- then convert back to single frame cels (without header, as this cel file don't have headers, you can see that, if you try to convert the multi-frame cel file into single-frame cel files immediately)

- then convert back to ungrouped Multi-Frame cel to get the original medtexts.cel file back. And here is the problem. I experienced the followings:
in the last step, when I try to convert Single-Frame cel files back into one Multi-Frame cel, the result will never be the exact original file. I compared the original and new cel files, that I got. Some (lonely) bytes are differs along the new cel file, and the last frame in the new file is totally messed up. When I look through the 55 frames of the original cel file, it looks good (after I set the width to 22 from 88 for the last frame). But when I load the first frame from the 55 single-frame cel files to batch convert all the frames into one multi-frame cel file, I cannot set the widths globally for all cel files (just for the first one). Maybe the batch converter messes up the last frame's width, as it does it for the original medtexts.cel file.

Regards,
mague

Edited by mague on 09 October 2006 at 18:22

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mague
Dark Spawn

Joined: 05 February 2006
Location: Hungary
Posts: 52

Posted: 09 October 2006 at 18:28 \| IP Logged

Here is the original and the new messed up medtexts.cel file. Click. Can you take a look at them for me, please?

Thanks.

Regards,
mague

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ArthurDent
Dark Lord

Joined: 25 May 2002
Location: Greece
Posts: 408

Posted: 12 October 2006 at 07:42 \| IP Logged

Hello mague,

- While TDG2 does it's best to auto-size frames there is some minor effort required in this case.

- Manually entering a Width for any frames that are displayed odd gives the ability to save them in a bmp file as the correct image. Trying to do the opposite process without doing something to the odd frames first will not have the intended results. As an example, try to open the single frame cel file after you convert it back to CEL from bmp. You will see that you have the same display problem and you have to manually enter the width again.

- The solution is to edit the bmp before converting it to CEL so that it will be displayed correctly without the need to manually enter a width. Usually, shifting the image one pixel to the right solves most problems. The main source of oddities is usually images that have the bottom-left pixel used as a non-mask byte and have no headers and/or height smaller than 32 pixels.

- This behavior is by design since i want to allow TDG2 to be able to construct CEL files that have frames with varying widths. Any other options would be messy since they would involve having to maintain "archive" files for each CEL that list the specific width of each comprising frame. The game manages that by hardcoding frame widths into the exe. TDG2 chooses to auto-detect frame widths (which is 99% correct for CEL files and 100% correct for CL2 files) which saves the user from a lot of effort.

- To cut a long story short, i have edited the offending frame by shifting it one pixel to the right and have made a new medtexts.cel file that you can use from now on as a starting point for all your "medtexts" editing needs.

Regards,

ArthurDent

Edited by ArthurDent on 12 October 2006 at 07:46

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ArthurDent
Dark Lord

Joined: 25 May 2002
Location: Greece
Posts: 408

Posted: 12 October 2006 at 07:53 \| IP Logged

Hello Ychiju,

- what you propose would be nice to have but unfortunately it would require a significant effort to implement.

- Due to time constraints, there are no plans at the present time to extend the functionality of TDG in that direction .

- while this might be irrelevant, TDG will offer some support for map files in the future.

Regards,

ArthurDent

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mague
Dark Spawn

Joined: 05 February 2006
Location: Hungary
Posts: 52

Posted: 12 October 2006 at 23:16 \| IP Logged

Thanks ArthurDent, I will try it out.

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mague
Dark Spawn

Joined: 05 February 2006
Location: Hungary
Posts: 52

Posted: 14 October 2006 at 10:16 \| IP Logged

Hello ArthurDent.

Unfortunately the new medtexs.cel that you made has the "0A000000000000000000" headers (55 pieces). I hexedited the cel file to get rid of them, and rewrote the offsets to the frames. The result is differs from the original medtexts.cel in four bytes (but this is caused by the shifting right?).
After that, I realized that TDG2 can take out the "0A000000000000000000" headers for me automatically within a sec

. Shame on me

Finally the new medtexts.cel (without the headers) don't crashes the game at this offset: 004281B9 (all my earlier medtexts.cel files crashed the game at this point

).

So thanks again for the new medtexts.cel that you made for me! It works!

A few minutes ago, I changed the "A" letter to "N" in the medtexts.cel file, just to see if it is working.

tadaaamm:

Thanks again, for your help.

Regards,
mague

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ArthurDent
Dark Lord

Joined: 25 May 2002
Location: Greece
Posts: 408

Posted: 14 October 2006 at 17:17 \| IP Logged

Hello mague,

- glad it works. For the sake of completeness, I have updated the altered medtexts.cel with a version w/o headers.

Regards,

mague

Edited by ArthurDent on 14 October 2006 at 17:18

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ArthurDent
Dark Lord

Joined: 25 May 2002
Location: Greece
Posts: 408

Posted: 17 October 2006 at 20:36 \| IP Logged

@ HLFDRK52:

- here you can find all three sentinel animations in .cl2 format.

Regards,

ArthurDent

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glorer
Dark One

Joined: 31 December 2006
Posts: 1

Posted: 31 December 2006 at 19:23 \| IP Logged

cant download the medtexts.cel modified file, pls reload

ArthurDent
Dark Lord

Joined: 25 May 2002
Location: Greece
Posts: 408

Posted: 28 February 2007 at 08:29 \| IP Logged

Hello all,

-TheDark Graphics Version 2.1 (Build 110) is available here.

-Features:

TDG can now display Special CEL files used in maps. It will also interpret MIN, SOL, TIL and AMP files and display Square and Tile information in separate windows.
TDG can now be used for deriving/editing SOL and AMP files.
Updated Help File

Comments:

- Some Square Properties, Tile Types and Tile Properties do not have intuitive descriptions yet. I would be grateful if the community could use the Squares and Tiles Windows to do some basic research about what each flag and/or number signifies. I know that some are described by Ulmo in another thread but a second look can't be that bad. When all missing descriptions are filled, I will release a Build that will include them.

- Tip: Don't forget to use an appropriate PAL file after you load a specific map.

Regards,

ArthurDent

Edited by ArthurDent on 28 February 2007 at 09:37

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