OBoE Scenario File Format

[*i]

This is the big change I've been working on for a while now. A major limitation on what we could do was dictated by the sizes of the data structures. I have implemented a way to port a BoE format scenario to an OBoE style format. All you need to do is load a scenario in the OBoE Editor and it will autoconvert it. All that remains is saving the file immediately after load to preserve the changes (editing will corrupt the file, but I put a big warning). There are still a few kinks to be worked out, with the towns, but I hope they will not be too bad.

 

As a test, I raised the number of scenario special nodes to 1000 and it appears to read in and recognize everything appropirately. Now, there is another limit/bug/feature that I discovered with the monster, item, specials menus. If the size is set too large (about 500 items), the program crashes. I haven't been able to figure out why yet. If anyone wants to take a look, that would be awesome. Just let me know and I'll tell you where, or you can find it yourself.

 

The other thing that is wrong is still the custom graphics not loading properly. I haven't looked at this yet, so I shall need to do that as well.

 

So with this new format, I can do a lot more as far as raising limits and such. If anyone has any suggestions, let me know.

[Lilith]

Quote:

Originally written by *i:
All you need to do is load a scenario in the OBoE Editor and it will autoconvert it. All that remains is saving the file immediately after load to preserve the changes (editing will corrupt the file, but I put a big warning).

In that case, wouldn't it be more sensible to just give three options whenever the user attempts to load a BoE scenario in the OBoE Editor: Save, Save As, and Cancel?

[*i]

Easier said than done. Doing so would mean mucking about more with the resources. If you feel like implementing it, or know how, let me know.

[Crynsos]

A thing about custom graphics for Mac users, to make it easier for everyone:

Try to make the Editor and OBoE player accept BOTH .MEG files (so older scenarios can still be used) and .PICT files. Pict is to my knowledge the standard Mac picture format, as it is BMP for Windows.

 

The Quality is quite the same as much as I've seen and .pict files are much easier to produce, which would be useful for every scenario creator. (And if a .meg file doesn't work but other graphic files are delivered with the Scen, the Mac user should be easily able to use it, once PICT gets accepted)

[Tesseract]

Quote:

Pict is to my knowledge the standard Mac picture format

Not any more. It's deprecated as of 10.4 (along with the rest of QuickDraw). TIFF, PNG and JPEG tend to be used for image resources in apps these days.

[Kelandon]

It would probably be simplest if we just made the Mac version able to accept BMPs, just like the Windows version. Any decent graphics editing program can make a BMP (whereas you really need ResEdit or something comparable to make a meg), and they're already included with existing scenarios.

[Niemand]

if it's of any help, Graphic Adjuster contains code for importing BMPs into Quickdraw GWorlds, importBMPFileToGWorld being the key function, so you could add that to load in BMP graphics without having to rewrite the game's actual drawing code. While exorcising Quickdraw entirely would be a good thing, generally speaking, it would also be a lot of work.