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Topic: Looking for a new, small programming project (Read 1444 times)
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Klarth
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« on: April 14, 2007, 08:48:05 pm » |
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So my ideas at the moment are a text dumper and a pointer table locator.
The text dumper would probably be something close to Atlas-like but I haven't had too many ideas for it because text dumpers are usually pretty easy to make.
The pointer table locator would be configurable to identify all whole-byte pointer tables...and possibly do multifile scanning.
Any input on which is needed more and also some ideas on what kind of features should be included?
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Spikeman
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« Reply #1 on: April 14, 2007, 09:14:25 pm » |
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Remake FEIDIAN. Seriously, no one knows how to use it and if possible, give it a good GUI.
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Klarth
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« Reply #2 on: April 14, 2007, 09:31:38 pm » |
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Unfortunately that's not a small project I could do in a weekend or so. I have about 3 hours of semi-free time per day (Mon->Fri) that I need to do things like keep up with military room, uniform, hair, etc standards after my day is over. Also, I have a girlfriend that I keep close contact with so I don't have the time required to make a program like that.
Though I've thought of doing something like that far in the past...I just didn't have the programming skills to pull it off then.
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Gemini
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« Reply #3 on: April 14, 2007, 09:41:38 pm » |
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Remake FEIDIAN. Seriously, no one knows how to use it and if possible, give it a good GUI.
You mean something like this?  I guess that could be done, but it won't be easy. :/ Managing scripts like FEIDIAN's is really a bitch. >_> |
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DaMarsMan
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« Reply #4 on: April 14, 2007, 11:45:09 pm » |
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May I suggest a script dumper that dumps from pointers instead of a block. It sucks when you have to do a custom dumper cause the text is scattered.
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Kajitani-Eizan
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« Reply #5 on: April 15, 2007, 02:22:55 am » |
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also, add the whole automatic shifting of excess text in a block to a free space area thing to atlas  |
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KaioShin
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« Reply #6 on: April 15, 2007, 04:34:52 am » |
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Auto add some intelligent formatting to the script dumps. I hate nothing more than a script dumper which gives you one endless line of characters.
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snesmaster40
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« Reply #7 on: April 15, 2007, 05:36:42 am » |
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Remake FEIDIAN. Seriously, no one knows how to use it and if possible, give it a good GUI.
You mean something like this? I guess that could be done, but it won't be easy. :/ Managing scripts like FEIDIAN's is really a bitch. >_> Oh yes! |
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Deuce
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« Reply #8 on: April 15, 2007, 09:27:41 am » |
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Here's an idea... a tile viewer/editor with an arranger like Tile Layer Pro, except let you export the arrangement as a bitmap. Then, for import, have it read the same arrangement data and (as long as the imported BMP is the right size/color depth, of course), break it down into its appropriate pieces and place them in the file.
So yeah, FEIDIAN with a GUI. I vote that.
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Klarth
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« Reply #9 on: April 15, 2007, 12:43:28 pm » |
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Atlas update with free space regions...possible. I don't have the time to recode it from scratch like I wanted to though so the extension support stopped sucking. The free space regions would require a major update to the statistics system and that's the only difficulty there would be in adding it.
Anything dealing with a complex GUI or tile editing...NO. No time for that, sorry.
And on the text dumper...it would definitely dump by pointer (why make a block dumper that's been done a million times over?). On the formatting part, it'd obviously be able to handle some formatting code. If you check the simple block dumper I made and included in TableLib, it supports \\n line breaks in table entries. Also it has the option to prefix strings with the offset it was dumped from.
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RedComet
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« Reply #10 on: April 15, 2007, 01:06:31 pm » |
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And on the text dumper...it would definitely dump by pointer (why make a block dumper that's been done a million times over?). On the formatting part, it'd obviously be able to handle some formatting code. If you check the simple block dumper I made and included in TableLib, it supports \\n line breaks in table entries. Also it has the option to prefix strings with the offset it was dumped from.
That would be a godsend. I'd definitely use it. The way things are now I usually have to throw together a custom dumper to dump from the pointer tables to deal with whatever idiotic scheme the programmers decided to use. My requests would be make the pointer definitions fully customizable. For instance, first two bytes are the pointer, ignore the next three bytes, next two bytes are the next pointer, and so on. Once you get the pointer do you need to add X to it? Subtract X from it? EOR it with X? So, definable pointer sizes and some way to handle relative pointers. And some decent documentation.  Atlas is a great program but some of its features could be explained a little better. |
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Klarth
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« Reply #11 on: April 15, 2007, 01:19:36 pm » |
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And some decent documentation. Atlas is a great program but some of its features could be explained a little better. I wanted to redo the Atlas documentation before I left but it wasn't meant to be I suppose. My gf was going to help me but then that didn't end up working out and I did ScriptCrunch, TableLib, and the Mother 3 dumper/inserter instead. But I've gotten an idea from your post of how to avoid programming a formula parser for the pointers. It'd be kinda like assembly or a Direct3D pipeline where you have to setup each operation in a row, one step at a time. Nobody likes the pointer table finding program...I myself would have found that very useful because I'm lazy. I guess nowadays with so many debugging/tracing emus, it's not as useful as it would have been half a decade or more ago. So I guess it appears that I'll be attempting an Atlas miniupdate or a script dumper. |
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Kajitani-Eizan
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« Reply #12 on: April 15, 2007, 07:33:04 pm » |
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or both, to form a complete Atlas-based solution! then i'll have to write programs just to convert my current BS, crappily-coded stuff into Atlas-compatible stuff... perhaps a function to search for other pointers, outside of the current pointer block, that point to text that is also pointed to by pointers within the current block? (i know, that sounded convoluted as hell, but surprise, surprise, ND2 does it.) i guess it doesn't matter too much, though, as when that other pointer block is dumped, the text being pointed to can be split into two separate strings, each within their own block. |
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DaMarsMan
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« Reply #13 on: April 16, 2007, 05:32:59 pm » |
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How about create a font width calculator for atlas...With an extra table for pixel widths and #FORMATON() and off tags to stop autoformatting.
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Klarth
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« Reply #14 on: April 16, 2007, 07:30:11 pm » |
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If I had the time to rewrite Atlas like I wanted to, I was planning on adding text dumping functionality somehow. But I don't have the time for that...maybe in a few months when I'm in Phase II training and working 12 hour shifts with lots of days off.
I also thought about adding autoformatting to Atlas, but I figured it'd be better if a third party tool was developed for that rather than adding more stuff to behind the scenes. Also, the thing of building "string tables" and pointing to identical strings (stored only once) might be a bit too much coding for the benefit it offers when you could use manual pointer writing or embedded pointers.
So lets limit the discussion to Atlas features not involving the extensions system and a new text dumper.
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