Community
AGI Programming => AGI Development Tools => Topic started by: lance.ewing on June 24, 2011, 01:06:50 PM
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sact at the scummvm forums posted a link to a version of Joakim Moller's Visual APE tool that I have never seen before. It is a fully working AGI picture editor, and it has most of the features I intended to implement for the next Milestone of PICEDIT. Here is a direct link (grab it while you can):
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3712820/Visual%20AGI%20Picture%20Editor%201.0.1407.2498.zip
I tried tracking this tool down a few months ago but couldn't find it anywhere. The home web page has disappeared, none of the other AGI sites seem to have it. But what I was expecting to find was a tool that wasn't as complete and polished as the above. This tool is just really amazing. It has draggable vertices, draggable fill points, a simplified tool set, a scrollbar for navigating within the picture that redraws the picture in real time as you scroll, all of which are things I was going to add for 1.3. I had no idea Joakim had got this far with his tool.
How many people remember seeing this version?
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Dangit I missed this. Is this still available somewhere?
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It's on the Wiki. I wish that I could get the source for it since it is in C#.
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Hmmm it's listed but the download is only for the sound editor. It only shows a screenshot from the sound editor as well.
http://agiwiki.sierrahelp.com/index.php?title=Visual_AGI_Picture_Editor
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OK, that page was just a duplicate of the Visual AGI Sound editor that I was going to modify for the PIC editor, but I never got back to it. The AGI Wiki never as complete as the SCI Wiki. I had no help and I was trying to reconstruct it based on the the original from the Wayback. I finished adapting that page to the Visual Picture Editor and fixed the link. It can also be found in the IDE category - http://agiwiki.sierrahelp.com/index.php?title=Visual_AGI
I was fooling around with it a bit and found it to be the easiest vector picture resource I have tried, and that includes SCI Studio and Companion, too.
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Nice. Thanks for the work, man. I mean all of it. Putting those Wikis together and organizing all the old tools that would have been lost to time and even all the work you do on the installers and other utilities. Just fantastic. As a fellow avid collector and obsessor of Sierra development tools and all these kinds of things I really appreciate your work in giving them a home for a little while longer on the internet.
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Well I wanted to preserve them. I doubt that there will ever be a thriving AGI community again, but want the resources to be available for anyone wanting to explore them.
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I managed to track down Chris Cromer and he had the source to Visual AGI and gave it to me. I was a little surprised that it compiled without any tweaking after upgrading to VS2010.
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Fantastic! If only the old AGI and Mega-Tokyo forum databases were so lucky.
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I am trying to modernize it. Somethings are done in a more straight forward way now. MenuStrips and ToolStrips have replaced menubars and toolbars. They allow much greater flexibility in the designer where you can treat individual buttons and menu items as discrete static objects instead of collections. This is turning out to be a more convoluted process than I had anticipated. I can also tell that they were just learning dotNET as they did some things in a needlessly complicated way. Some of the scripts are large enough that with their scripting style it is a bit of a pain to sort out. I want to make it more modular to make it easier to adapt to other things.
As I noted earlier, it is by far the easiest picture editor of any AGI or SCI IDE that I have found. I would like to adapt it to SCI if possible.
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Could you possibly put the source available for download please?
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As I noted earlier, it is by far the easiest picture editor of any AGI or SCI IDE that I have found. I would like to adapt it to SCI if possible.
I fully agree with that comment about how easy it is. I was amazed with it when I gave it a go back in 2011. I was imagining these same types of features for the next milestone of the Java PICEDIT tool, but I kept tying myself up in knots thinking about how to handle the interaction in an elegant way. Then I discovered that Joakim had already done it. He's done a brilliant job.
I look forward to seeing what you come up with.
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Anyone have a download link for this visual agi thing?
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If no-one else has put a link to it by then, I'll upload it to my www.agifans.com site by the end of the weekend, or sooner if I get a chance.
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Done. It was sooner rather than later: You can find it here:
http://www.agifans.com/files/
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Much appreciated. I like the clean simplicity of the tool, although I guess that's somewhat a reflection of AGI?
Being able to move vertices is nice. It looks like you have to position the slider at the correct spot first though, right? Like, you are only able to move vertices for the line/fill at the current position.
The zoomed in view is useful too.
I think another nice feature would be to have a mini-preview of the final picture as you're editing stuff earlier on in the vector stack - so you can see what your edits are doing to the final image.
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It is alos on the Wiki http://agiwiki.sierrahelp.com/index.php?title=Visual_AGI
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Late replay... Thanks for that. Unfortunately I couldn't run it at Linux, probably some .net thingy.
I can't install Microsoft Active Accessibility (MSAARK) neither (got some weird message).
But you should provide it anyway as a companion file, if needed (e.g. for Win95 emulation, new ARMS are strong enough to do it).
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Of course it has .NET dependencies. it was written in C#. The Microsoft Active Accessibility is really only needed for older versions of Windows. Were you trying to run it with WINE? One of the Linux users here may have some information on running .NET apps on Linux.
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Not a Linux user perse but I do try to keep most of my own .Net stuff compatible enough to run on Linux. But not to run it on WINE. I meant compatible with Mono.
In fact right now there are two instances of my made-in-C# chatbot running on my Debian server through Mono.
Mono-compatibility basically boils down to not using any OS-specific system calls (P/Invokes). That goes all three ways -- if you write a Mono app on Linux and have it use Linux calls it won't run on Windows either. Now, the standard library mscorlib uses a shitton of P/Invokes, but that's the beauty of it -- Mono's implementation of mscorlib doesn't... necessarily. And it can even do WinForms!
Another important thing is not hardcoding paths and such, or even using "\" as a path separator. Instead, you use the System.IO.Path static and its various helpers. That way, running under Linux, you'll automatically use "/".
Now, what one could do is run the program in question through the Migration Analyzer (http://www.mono-project.com/docs/tools+libraries/tools/moma/), see what it has to say about the feasibility of running this on Mono.
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Not that that really helps with such an old binary.
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Another beautiful thing about .Net apps is that they are usually quite decompilable 8)
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Oh, I have the source for it, but not as a standalone application. What I have is an MDI child form of the old, unfinished Visual AGI project. The MDI Picture Editor child could be extracted for a standalone app, but I do not see much point in that. Besides the code for color selection was rather bizarrely convoluted. I have simplified and modernized it. It has now been incorporated into our larger AGI/SCI IDE project. I have made the missing editors, but more work sill need to be done on the backend for the logic and save for the objects editor. Unfortunately Gumby has not been around lately.
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Of course it has .NET dependencies. it was written in C#. The Microsoft Active Accessibility is really only needed for older versions of Windows. Were you trying to run it with WINE? One of the Linux users here may have some information on running .NET apps on Linux.
Hm, wouldn't you find it ironic: "The Microsoft Active Accessibility is really only needed for older versions of Windows" ?
We are supporting AGI from 1984., but not MAA (1997) needed for Win95. ??? New ARMs are fast & strong enough to emulate Win95 but not Win7.
Never mind.
Well, I tried to run it with WINE several times, no success. There are couple of .NET apps I'm running with WINE. Unfortunately, VAGI is not one of them.
I'm not sure what's wrong, because WINE has "gold"/"platinum" status for most .NET Frameworks versions (https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=2586).
Probably something related to this:
"Always install with recent 'winetricks' in clean 32-bit wineprefix for best results."
(64-bit environment is not supported at some things as it should be)
I did this but... didn't work. I tried also with "PlayOnLinux" (>some kind of Wine pre-set installers); here (http://www.aoaforums.com/frontpage/software-news-reviews-60/linux/12410-windows-packages-winetricks-and-playonlinux.html?start=5) is some others example what's going on.
(http://lookpic.com/O/t2/524/jmbWF1vi.png) (http://lookpic.com/O/i2/524/jmbWF1vi.png)
http://lookpic.com/O/i2/524/jmbWF1vi.png
Here is screenshot of what's going on: winetricks for .NET installer (e.g. v 2.0) claims that mono is not installed (which is), and right after that "64-bit is not supported" (it is not 64-bit). However, I have .NET 4.0 installed, some software is running flawlessly. But VAGI just won't start, no error messages.
Of course, I could run it through some virtual box, probably. But it is... humiliating.
e. g. I'm running Photoshop CS2-6 w/o problems.
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The original program is old enough that the .NET target is probably more like 1.1. Of course there are other AGI pic editors, including Lance's JAVA PicEdit.
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Yep, specifications said .NET v1.1. I am using the PicEdit, java version. WinAGI is helpfull too.
I found this interesting description of VAGI at ScummVM Wiki (http://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php/AGIWiki/Visual_AGI)
As interesting feature, Visual AGI Picture Editor can optimize pictures, even if the gain is only byte, preliminary testing has shown approximately 10% - 28,5% reduces in size with AGI-pictures produced by different methods, Sierra's games, Noptec Vector (http://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php/AGIWiki/Noptec_Vector).
Just I didn't find the time to study Noptec Vector (DOS); I am interested specifically at vectorization algorithms. It will be fun to trace bitmap drawings or photos with modern tracers like great one (Potrace (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potrace)) included in Inkscape (https://inkscape.org/en/); then through Vector or similar tool (e.g. VAGI).
I forgot to mention: Visual AGI Sound Editor is working just fine at Linux, which is also .NET driven. Strange enough!
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The Visual AGI Sound Editor is in C++.
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Thanks.
Maybe is something wrong with my wineprefix settings... I should try to make another one (clean, 32-bit).
I am too tired to doing it again, I tried dozen times... but there are at least two more Windows apps I can't run, one is in .NET for sure.
Oh, well.