DF-21 Forums

[C. Zoui]

I'm going to be creating .gifs of some Dark Forces baddies, and I would like to view the .WAXes separately from the game to make my life easier (instead of running the game, typing LAREDLIGHT, and screenshoting from different angles).

What is likely the easiest way to extract and view the .WAXes for someone completely unfamiliar with DF editing? I found this, but I'm not sure these programs will work on what I'm running (XP SP3).

[klasodeth]

[C. Zoui]

Wow. These two programs work amazingly well on XP. These are just what I needed! Thanks.

I did have to sort through a Moria-deep readme to find the instructions for converting .wax to .bmp, and there was neither any mention of needing to enter the command line in the Start > Run prompt (just clicking WAX2.exe won't get you to the prompt) nor how I should do so (you have to include the full path of WAX2.exe). This wasn't an problem for me, but I can see this being puzzling for computer novices. I suppose that if you haven't even mastered the command prompt, though, DF isn't the game for you to edit.

[klasodeth]

lol, yeah. Sorry I forgot to mention that. I hadn't used that utility recently, and having been an old DOS die-hard myself, I tend to forget that a lot of people haven't done much--if anything--with the command prompt. Thanks for bringing that up, for the people who might not be expecting it.

[The MAZZTer]

If a program uses a command-line interface, it's sort of INFERRED you have to access it from a command-line

But seriously, if you know enough about a program to know that clicking on it isn't going to work and that you need to use a command-line... then you're good. If not, chances are you don't even know how to use cmd.exe, and you're better off using some GUI tool than trying to learn it all just for one CLI tool.

And the screenshot idea is a bad idea, if only because all your angles would likely end up different sizes and you'd have to set up a special level with special textures for green-screen etc... direct dumping of animation is soo much easier.

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[Patrick Haslow]

Its too bad that the death of Mac OS 9 also meant the death of its DF Wax editor. Although it had a bug in it that screwed up the compiling of a lot of WAXes, it was indispensable for viewing all the frames of a wax right from the GUI. Much easier than using DOS programs. I was always surprised that no one made a GUI browser for all DF components- WAX, BM, VOC, 3DO. Mattias was working on that to some extent as part of CDark. It was pretty cool.

[Burning Gundam]

Guess we'll need to wait and see what Lucius has up his sleeves down the road for the editor.

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I don't think outside the box... I customize it.

[C. Zoui]

I have one small update/gripe. I want to create .gifs with a transparent background, but BMPDF automatically exports with a black background. I suspect that parts of some baddies' figures use the same color pixels as this black background, making it impossible to tell exactly what I need to be cutting from the .bmp (to be pasted onto a transparent background and saved in a format that displays a proper alpha channel).

Is there a way to get BMPDF to export to a different color background (like a bright green) that is less frequently used as part of the actual baddy's figure?

[Burning Gundam]

Well the truth of the matter is the black background was there to begin with, so there really isn't a way to change it unless you've made a custom PAL file that replaces that color. Otherwise if you have photoshop, you can just select the area you want cleared with the magic wand(make sure the contiguous option is ticked) and just clear the black area out.

I did something similar like that for a flash project back in the day.

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I don't think outside the box... I customize it.

[C. Zoui]

How can I create a custom PAL file, then, that will give me a bright green background?

I think you misunderstood the other part of my post. I'm well versed in cutting what I want from an image in Photoshop (I can do it in no less than six different ways); that's not the problem. The problem is that because both the background and parts of the figure are the same color black, there is no way for either any tool in photoshop or the human eye to distinguish what is part of the baddie and what is part of the background when blacks of the baddie and the black background border each other.

[lucius]

Change palette entry 0 to some other color. If that doesn't work I'll check my code again, but its a specific color index that is transparent, not a specific color. Of course this only applies to textures/sprites that the engine thinks are transparent, index 0 is usually black on wall or floor texture for example.

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[C. Zoui]

Awesome. I should have checked the editors and utilities section before asking about the .PAL modification. I edited and saved BEMYPAL.PAL (taken from Cyra, I'm assuming it's the default DF .PAL) in PACMUT to use bright green instead of black for "Color 0", moved it to my BMPDF directory, then simply added a parameter to the command line to have BMPDF use a custom .PAL file. It works like a charm!