Saturday, July 14, 2012

sprsplit.pl ; dumpanim.pl

SEDS, LEDS and AnimEDS use a dedicated file format: .spr, which is not very complicated, but specific to this project. The rationale is that, given the limited resources on the DS, I don't want to mess up with parsing or encoding of complex representation. I've got chunk of data, which have a given size and a given "type". This is how IFF files used to work back in the Amiga times, and I don't believe there is need for more over here.

However, with the toolset growing in features, hacking .spr files with an hex editor becomes tedious. A few weeks ago, I came up with two small tools -- sprsplit and sprmerge -- that can explode a .spr into one-file-per-chunk so that one could more easily e.g. replace a buggy animation with a sane one (from a previous file) without losing updates on the graphics themselves. Granted, a separate .anm file with the animations alone would have saved me the trouble :P


Bien: Bilou marche à gauche et à droite, escalade la règle, l'encre est animée et la "zone de collision principale" a fini de changer au moindre mouvement. Mis à part le côté 'bricolage' de la map et un nombre effrayant de messages de débug au démarrage, le niveau-test pour la school zone commence à devenir un brin plus propre. Dernier couac avant de m'intéresser de plus près aux "transanims": un à-coup dans la démarche de Bilou (alors que l'éditeur d'animation m'en fait un rendu parfaitement fluide ...)

Je sors donc un des petits outils développés dernièrement -- sprsplit -- pour "éclater" le fichier .spr correspondant en 'blocs logiques' histoire de repérer plus aisément l'animation qui cloche. Ensuite, un nouveau petit outil -- dumpanim -- va (enfin ;) me permettre de "décompiler" les commandes pour avoir la confirmation qu'une des commandes "délai 2 frames" n'a pas été convertie en "instruction pour l'éditeur d'animation" mais qu'elle reste bien présente dans les instructions adressées au moteur de jeu.

I've been one step further today, with a small "dumpanim" tool that present in a readable(?) format the content of an animation. It's crude, for sure, but less than mentally converting 0x2104fffe into UPDATE|COORDS|4|-2|-1 or 0x01000002 into CONTROL|DELAY|0x0002, etc. Here's how to make sense of its output:
  • :**=xxxx : this is a "definition", such as page numbers, box size, etc. They're only read once
  • .s?=yyyy : indicates that sprite #? should be changed
  • .c?=xx,yy : indicates that sprite #? should be moved to (relative) coordinates xx,yy
  • .m=xx,yy : indicates that the whole object should move by xx,yy
  • !dxxxx : indicates that we should pause for xxxx frames before going on with playback
  • !loop, !pop, !done : end-of-animation notifications
  • // : an annotation for the editor (typically, how to place frames on the timeline when only the movement of the GOB guides the playback speed).


Now that AnimEDS' export code is fixed, I have great walk animations. Huzzah!

Mais bon, assez ri: la maison a besoin d'un coup de pouce pour se ranger ... entre les chaussettes et dumblador qui se bloque dans tous les coins, je vais devoir ajuster mes priorités :P

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