Problem with Picedit (Java)

[lance.ewing]

Under Win98, Picedit worked fine. XP's got problems with it. Some years ago, The Joker taught me how to get around that, and I got the impression that Klownstein uses the same technique.

This technique (as far as I can remember) goes as following:

1. Draw a very basic, rough outline in Picedit (boot it up in Dosbox or whatever, suffer the weird shit it pulls for a short amount of time, then quit as soon as you can). Pic should be saved as BMP. This step is mainly to get the alignment of your lines right, not to do any actual drawing.

2. Open the BMP in MS Paint or whatever you want to use and flesh everything out.

3. To get the details (and especially dithering) in, use the selector tool to select the part you want to alter, copy it, open the Views editor in AGI Studio, paste it and treat it as a view. Then copy-paste it back into your BMP once you're done.

4. Save the file and convert it to an AGI picture using Vector


So... nope. People do use AGI Studio for picture editing, but not the way you think The Java version of Picedit helps alot in getting rid of the pain of step 1, though. Maybe it can be used to add a 5th step to the process: tweaking the picture to become less resource-intensive (turning it into as little vector commands as possible)

XP came out around 2001 didn't it? So I guess that between 98 and 2001 most of the fan made games probably used PICEDIT the way it was intended, and a lot of really good games with fairly impressive graphics came out during that time. After moving to XP, a lot of people probably used the technique you describe. It is a shame that agigames.com has gone because I would have liked to catch up on everything that happened back then....  spend some evenings reading through the old posts. I was able to have a brief look back in September last year before it died, but only enough to see a few people cursing PICEDIT. 

[lance.ewing]

It looks like AGI Studio was open source. As an experiment, I dropped the PicEdit jar and the compiled batch file to launch it in the AGI Studio folder and AGI Studio does launch it. If the command line options remain the same as with the DOS version it looks like that it should work without any modification of AGI Studio.

Hey, that's good to know. I'll add the command line option right now then. It might be a while before I create another JAR though. Maybe I'll tidy up the features I'm currently working on and create a milestone 1 build for 1.3.

Well, it might have to be a guess as to what that command line option was. The version of the C code I've got doesn't have such a command line option. The only option it seems to have is for loading a PCX background image. But I obviously did write a version that took a PICTURE resource as a parameter because that is what AGIStudio is using. I guess it is possible it was a special build for Peter, but I would have thought I would have kept that in the app.

An assumption would be that you run it like this:  PICEDIT PICTURE.001

I'm on a Mac at the moment, so can't verify yet whether the version bundled with AGIStudio works in that way (unless I were to download AGIStudio, extract the EXE, install dosbox and give it a whirl).

[Collector]

The Nailhead AGI Studio is, of course, a Win32 app. The Peter Kelly AGI Studio does not seem to be available, anymore. I was using the Nailhead, which still relied on PicEdit.

[MusicallyInspired]

I still have Peter Kelly's AGI Studio somewhere. I keep all this old stuff lol. At one point I backed up everything that was available on the Ultimate AGI & SCI Website....everything that wasn't a dead link anyway.

[Collector]

At one point I backed up everything that was available on the Ultimate AGI & SCI Website....everything that wasn't a dead link anyway.

I did, too, but sometimes it can be a real pain digging up files from several machines back. Have to go through who knows how many old CDRs to find anything.

[MusicallyInspired]

Lol exactly.

[lance.ewing]

The Nailhead AGI Studio is, of course, a Win32 app. The Peter Kelly AGI Studio does not seem to be available, anymore. I was using the Nailhead, which still relied on PicEdit.

This site (and other similar mirrors) seem to have the Peter Kelly version:

http://www.ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archiveXprogrammingXagi.html

I downloaded it but I'm now doubting whether I did implement a command line option for the picture resource filename. The version of PICEDIT packaged with the Nailhead version doesn't seem to support it, and the version at the above site doesn't seem to either.

It's a mystery. Maybe it was a false memory. Maybe we never properly integrated the tools.

Robin, can you remember how the old version of PICEDIT integrated with AGI Studio. Did it actually load the picture up in PICEDIT automatically? Or did it require the user to manually load the picture?

[lance.ewing]

I still have Peter Kelly's AGI Studio somewhere. I keep all this old stuff lol. At one point I backed up everything that was available on the Ultimate AGI & SCI Website....everything that wasn't a dead link anyway.

I unfortunately lost a lot of what I had, and it was a fairly big collection of various tools. I wish I still had all the old BASIC apps that I wrote to work out all the various AGI formats during the early 90s. It would be quite nostalgic to see it now.

Anything I do still have from then is packed away in storage on the other side of the world. What I have with me at present I've downloaded off the net.

[lance.ewing]

Source code for AGI Studio:

http://www.nailhead.org/agistudio/download.shtml

This should answer the question about how PICEDIT was launched.

[lance.ewing]

And this is the answer:

{*************************************************************}
procedure TMain.ToolsPiceditClick(Sender: TObject);
{*************************************************************}
var TempPChar : PChar;
begin
  if FileExists(ProgramDir+'PICEDIT.EXE') then
  begin
    if GameIsOpen then ChDir(GameDir)
    else ChDir(ProgramDir);
    GetMem(TempPChar,Length(ProgramDir+'PICEDIT.EXE')+1);
    StrPCopy(TempPChar,ProgramDir+'PICEDIT.EXE');
    WinExec(TempPChar,SW_SHOW);
    FreeMem(TempPChar,Length(ProgramDir+'PICEDIT.EXE')+1);
  end
  else
  begin
    ToolsPicedit.Enabled := False;
    ShowMessage('File PICEDIT.EXE not found!');
  end;
end;


There is nothing in there that I can see that shows it appending the picture resource file on the end of the WinExec call. It must simply launch the tool and that is that.

[robingravel]

Robin, can you remember how the old version of PICEDIT integrated with AGI Studio. Did it actually load the picture up in PICEDIT automatically? Or did it require the user to manually load the picture?

It requires the user to manually load the pictures. Picedit remembers the game directory.

Also you can find old agistudio and piciedit at:
http://membres.multimania.fr/agisite/utils.htm


Robin Gravel

[Collector]

I see what is going on, now. Being a DOS app, the original PicEdit would start looking in its own directory, first. The Java PicEdit uses the modern "good practice" of always starting in the user's folder, forcing the user to navigate back to the AGI Studio's folder (where PicEdit is).

[lance.ewing]

I guess there is a question there about whether the modern good practice is appropriate to PICEDIT. Yeah, what I'm doing is using the standard open file dialog that comes with Java, which would behave as you describe. I could customise it to default to where PICEDIT is, or whatever the current dir is.

[Collector]

If it was only a stand alone program it might make sense to use modern standards, but since it would usually be used with other tools, most behaving as legacy programs, it seems to make more sense to start in its current folder, or at least to be able to specify a default folder to start in. Perhaps a plain INI or XML preferences file in an "%LocalAppData%\.PICEDIT" folder? Or would this require the jar to be signed?

[lance.ewing]

I can certainly understand the issue now. The other night I was trying to find a particular picture from SQ2 by loading each picture in turn until I found it. Every time I selected Load Picture, it started in the users home directory, from where I had to navigate back into the SQ2 folder, which was about five nested sub-directories below the user home dir.

So I've made some changes to be included in the first milestone release of 1.3. It will now start in the current directory (whatever that happens to be when PICEDIT is run) and then it remembers the last directory used between subsequent uses of the save/load file dialogs. I have also added the current picture file name to the title bar. We won't have to wait long for this milestone release. 1.3M1 should be out fairly soon. I have tidied up the features that were being worked on and all that is left is to create the JAR and upload it. I am expecting there to be at least three milestone releases for 1.3.