PICEDIT 1.3 Milestone 1 released

AGI, SCI, Wintermute, Sludge engines fangame creation discussion

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sact
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Post by sact »

Years ago, I was looking for any software that might help me with my eternity AGI-gameproject, I kept downloading everything I stumbled upon. That's when I found Visual AGI Picture Editor. I had such great hopes for Visual AGI IDE Möller was developing with Gustav Wennerholm, there was a screenshot about it in Visual AGI website but they had only released separate modules such as tracker-like Visual AGI-composing software and Visual AGI Picture Editor. But I have not encountered it anywhere else since then. Few years ago, when AGI Wiki still worked, I wrote an article about that tool, I think the website still worked back then. But suddenly it just vanished. I did google for Joakim Möller, and found many software involved links, none of them mentioning AGI. It could be him. Or not. Nevertheless, Visual AGI Picture Editor deserves to be more widely known!

PICEDIT, though step-tool might be remnant of the past, I do like it and appreciate it, spare that one please! But pen is just lite version of line, and could be replaced with single pixel tool.

P.S. A correction: I claimed Visual AGI Picture Editor optimized version showed correctly in game, I did look it again and noticed there were errors. Mea culpa. Some of the optimized pictures do work wo any issues, some can't be even added to the game without AGI Studio complaining and the gas station; AGI Studio accepted it and looked just fine in preview but in game it had errors.
lance.ewing
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Post by lance.ewing »

Regarding single point lines, I have now confirmed that the original Sierra interpreter supported this feature for all 4 of the line types, i.e. absolute line, relative line, x-corner and y-corner (the last two are covered by the Step tool). So what this means is that I need to apply my fix to Line, Pen and Step.

The Brush tool is obviously a way of drawing single points, but it seems fairly likely that this tool was not always available to the original Sierra AGI developers. I've heard it said that SQ2 is the only game that uses it (not sure if this is true or not). Since SQ2 was one of the later AGIv2 games, it may have used a newer version of the picture editor that supported the Brush tool and therefore had a simple way of plotting single points. But prior to that, the single point line feature must have been their only option.
lance.ewing
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Post by lance.ewing »

Well it turns out I can only implement the complete fix for the Line and Pen tools. The Step tool poses a problem because of the way I have designed it. In the underlying AGI raw data, there are actually two picture actions that Step relates to. These are the x-corner and y-corner (also known as horizontal first and vertical first). They basically do the same thing except that they go either horizontally or vertically on the first step. That is the only difference.

Now, the way I've designed support for this is to detect which one of these underlying raw tool codes to use based on the user's second click. I actually let them decide if they want to go horizontally first or vertically first, and after that first click it locks them in to that decision. Unfortunately at that point the line has already become a two point line, which makes support for single point lines impossible at this point in time.

So what I've implemented is partial support for such lines. PICEDIT will let you load an AGI picture that has a single point x-corner or single point y-corner, and it will let you edit such a picture, but it won't let you create single point lines for those tools. In order to support that, I would need to split the Step tool into two tools.

Hmmm. Thinking about it, there is one way I could add support without needing to split the tool in to two, but I'm not sure it is worth it.
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