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[Mike Mayday]

Ok,this is something that sound relatively simple and yet would greatly speed up the gfx-modding process.
What I would love to see is an application that searches the raws for displayable things and provides a GUI for choosing graphics for them.

After searching the raws, this is what you'd end up with:

The example shows the basic creatures page. Different pages have different columns available:

Creatures: CREATURE_TILE, Adult, Child, Zombie, Skeleton
Vermin: CREATURE_TILE
Shrubs: PICKED_TILE, SHRUB_TILE, DEAD_SHRUB_TILE
Trees: Tree_tile
SOIL, GEMS and STONES: TILE
MINERALS: TILE, OBJECT_tile

Another series of pages would be for civilizations: so the app would have to search the raws and check for all the different icons a civilization can use and list them just as above. This could probably include the animalmen civs.

Now how the app would work? First, you choose the dimension of the gfx set you want to set up.
To everything except the creatures, you click on a box and the image of the main tileset pops up. You click on the appropriate tile and the object gets the appropriate tile number assigned in the raws. Ideally, you should be able to select multiple objects at the same time (like selecting a few types of minerals and clicking on the left box for one of them to edit their unmined icon for all of them).

For the creatures: when you click the first box, this works as above. The second box however opens a list of gfx files you have stored in your raws folder, then you choose the tile in this image. To speed things up, I store creature graphics next to each other (adult, child, zombie, skeleton) so these could be automatically filled in (so If I choose tile 0:4 for a creature, 1:4 would abe automatically assigned to his child, 2:4 to zombie and 3:4 to skeleton). Even if that happened, the next tiles could still be customized (in the same manner as the main one, just without the auto fill-in).

For civs: well, the app would have to scan the raws for all the positions, professions, soldiers, etc.
Soldiers could be auto filled-in (soldier, elite, guard, elite guard, royal guard, elite royal guard, adventurer, elite adventurer, skeleton, elite skeleton, zombie, elite zombie)

Being able to save all the changes done to raw/objects in a backup file (to auto-apply them to a new version) would be super sweet.

So what do you think? Is is doable?

[Razputin]

I think i'll give this a go in java, my file i/o skills could use some work.

[Phoebus]

That would seriously accelerate the graphic modding process.
Simply a read only version that would list all of the listed units from existing raws & bitmaps would be greatly useful.
Right now we have no way of even knowing if one of our line/file is invalid/incorrect before we see the appropriate unit(s) ingame.

[Razputin]

Before I get to far in can you answer some questions?  The name of the file(s) the game reads the graphic settings from is just named graphics_whatever? or something else?

Also for the races do they all have the same proffesions available?

[Mike Mayday]

No, this is what makes stuff complicated...

Everything displayed has its tile setup in raw/objects, somewhere in its definition.
The graphics for civs and creatures are indeed stored in graphics_whatever.txt

The availability of proffesions is defined in raw/entity_default.txt

If there's anything else you need to know, please ask. I'll try to help in whatever way I can.

[Plac1d]

For anybody reading this thread interested in this sort of thing, you may also find Urist McModder (http://www.bay12games.com/forum/index.php?topic=31941.msg469896#msg469896a) a useful utility that you can download. Just a general heads up.

[Razputin]

For anybody reading this thread interested in this sort of thing, you may also find Urist McModder (http://www.bay12games.com/forum/index.php?topic=31941.msg469896#msg469896a) a useful utility that you can download. Just a general heads up.

Does that do what you want?  I'm going to keep working for the time being.

[Mike Mayday]

Not quite, it's much more unnecessary work than what I had in mind.

[Razputin]

all right well i'll keep working at it then if someone finds the end product useful,  gonna take a few days.  I am working on reading entities files right now to get the list of things that can have graphics which is going alright so far.

Also I have another question, stones minerals etc I thought these were from the tileset not graphics?

Second in the graphics_*.txt iare the dimension hieght:width or width:height?

[Mike Mayday]

all right well i'll keep working at it then if someone finds the end product useful,  gonna take a few days.  I am working on reading entities files right now to get the list of things that can have graphics which is going alright so far.

Also I have another question, stones minerals etc I thought these were from the tileset not graphics?

Yeah, the tile used to display them is set in raw/objects so that's what would have to be edited.

Second in the graphics_*.txt iare the dimension hieght:width or width:height?

It's width:height, the first tile having number 0.

Many thanks for working on this, it will save every gfx modder days of work.

[Razputin]

Ok so I am still working on getting the GUI set up and it is going well.  Does DF support BMP only or PNG as well?

[snaggles]

Currently, only bmp. Once Toady merges with the d# stuff, we'll get our transparency and png formats back.

[Igfig]

Oh hey, it just so happens that I've been writing something very similar to this for myself.  I'm using Python, though.

I started with the bmp i/o side of things instead of the GUI, and tried to stay completely inside the raw/graphics folder... but I see the appeal of taking info directly from the object raws.  I might just look into that.

I'll make my graphics manager available when it's finished.  That might not be for a while, though, since I'm doing it for fun in my spare time.  I'll let you know.

[Razputin]

My thinking was that using the object files would make the program work with new versions easier.  To be honest I'm not 100% sure yet how all the files work but I'm figuring it out as I go.

I'll probably include png support anyways then as java doesn't really care I was wondering more so I could limit choices for image formats and hopefully people will be aware they can't use them right away.

[Mike Mayday]

Hey there Raz. It appears that by simple coincidence, hermano has just created an app covering the raw/objects part of the functionality. It appears it does the job perfectly so raw/graphics is all that's left.
http://www.bay12games.com/forum/index.php?topic=54669.0

Just thought I'd let you know.