MDL, MTD etc file editor in the work

Hey, right on!

I have an idea about web space as well. I'll look into it and get back to you.

Cheers.

Interesting... apparently you only have a limited time in which to edit your own messages... anyway...

About webspace... you can host your utility at the Orion Sector if you like.

http://www.orionsector.com/index.shtml

We have a small GalCiv section, and it would be nice to have some more content anyway. Let me know when you have something you want to put up, and I'll make the arrangements.

[Edit: link issues ]

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Well I've got the mtd packer/unpacker done but it's not much use since you can't do anything with the resulting files. Everything stored in those archives seems to be some damned custom file format. Palettes, sprites, tiles etc everything will need an editor .

The sprite editor is coming along fairly well. I'm supporting only 8bit sprites for now but I think that most galciv data is in 8 bit anyway. I'll try to find some webspace to post a screenshot .

Ok, here's a screenshot with a short desciption : http://godevaccoder.greatnow.com/Shots/Screen.html

Be careful, sometimes the pop-up on that free host can be agressive but nothing improper aka pr0n.

Hey, guys, somebody (namely, Star Devil Thrull) submitted changed ships for the Drengin empire to the Library. Won't it be wise to ask him how and what was done, rather then going all the way from start?

Looks good so far.

Hopefully it will be well-documented enough that those of us who are fairly useless with graphics won't have to bug you with silly questions too often...

[Edit: @Yuri1971 - IIRC, he did that mod the hard way... using the tools provided by the devs some time ago. I don't think I have the natural talent for that, so I bug other people to create better tools for me... ]
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Thrull started of with the ship builder and then switched to Mutil IIRC. Honestly, unless you have good knowledge of 2d graphic theory, using mutil makes no sense at all. That and it's buggy as hell.

The ship builder is well done but it can be used only to create new ships. This would allow you to mod all the aspects of the game, from menus to stars.

I just had a thought. It would be trivial to have a function to import movies like avi, mpeg, divx etc into gal civ sprites. That way you could easily make new anomalies and sun animations. Just render them in lightwave or max voila, you're done!

That would be cool to have as well. Anomaly models were one of the first things that I thought to add (there are 3 unused types, but 2 of them seem to be missing models). I think I might even have a copy of Animation Shop (I know, but it was free, and I already told you what my graphics abilities were like... )or something like that around, which would make things fairly simple if your utility will handle the conversion.

*Opens the champagne bottle*

Woot! I was able to save a sprite sequence and have mutil read it back correctly. I was really nervous about this step because frankly there's a couple of things I didn't understand about the file format and I was afraid it would explode in my face when it came to saving the result to galciv format.

I'll do some more testing and see if the game itself reacts well to ships encoded with my program.
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Damn, galciv doesn't like my saved graphics. I suppose there's something I miss. Well, that'll be for tommorow, I have some other work to do today ;(.

Mmm I know I should be doing studying for uni but a bit of reading through the old mutil documention and carielf notes on the ship builder gave me the hints I needed. I added it to the encoder and now I just need to find some of the bugs left in the encoding process. That's *easy* since the problem isn't an unknown part of the file format I have to hack but just a bug in my code.

Works in game now. There's some visual artifacts appearing sometimes but it works. I hope it's a bug in the encoding and not something I haven't noticed about the file format. That could be... painful.

Everything works perfectly now! It saves and load exactly like the original .

Congrats!

It sounds like you're making good progress.

Yeah, but I'm in my exam week right now. I'm afraid progress my slow or grind to a halt for a week or two ;(.

On the other hand, I had some fun modding map backgrounds and other nifty stuff .

I worked some more on the interface, here's a screnshot of what it's going to look like the final version : http://godevaccoder.greatnow.com/Shots/Screen.html

I'm getting pretty close to a release version, a beta version of course .

Still will need to polish the tools for extracting/packing mtd files and an editor for the color palettes.

Just for the record, I've not given up or anything but in University it's the exam period and I've had an unexpected contract for a small business app that had to be done the day my exam period ends. Talk about bad luck, no more free time for me heh.

I'd finish the beta this week end but I'm going to my gf place to spend the week end there . Probably this week, I'd say.
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Oh, I would have to say that takes precedence over any programming you have.

Let us know when it is down, and let me know if you need some beta testers?

Well the sprite editor is done now. I'm trying to finish writting the archive and palette editors for galciv. Pretty minor stuff compared to the sprite editors but it still has to be done if any meaningful work is to be done with sprites.

The MTD/MDL editor is taking longer than I thought :/. I settled for a WinZip like program, so it's taking longer than the two simple pack/unpack utils I'd planned.

Dark Rain, I see you're having fun programming and hacking away (I do too, but not for the same game » Etherlords / www.etherplanes.net), but there is something I don't understand.

The developers of the game must have some utilities they used to create all the files the game is made of - why can't they make those available? I mean okay, it's probably some rough stuff, but I would even be willing to pay for it if it can enhance my gaming experience, and that's what this is about, right?

Making a game open for mods is one way to guarantee its longevity, so why not take that a step further? I'm tired of having to do the whole work (even if it is fun too for a while) the developers have already done :notsure:

Aeon... Have you seen this link? http://www.galciv.com/forum.asp?BID=GM&id=72905

It's a sticky in this forum.

Yeah there's tools available but they're so convoluted that less than 5 people on this forum ever learnt to use them. It's because it's so hard to learn how to do anything, coupled with an atrocious interface. I was able to learn how to use it pretty much only because I did a lot of graphic porgramming.

Oh and status report : I've finised writting the sprite editor and the archive editor and I'm halfway through a palette editor. Also, I've axed the movie import feature for the first release.