Player Graphic Development Tool (PGDT) version 1.11 -- 7/20/2002


Download here

Update 7/20/2002 -- version 1.11
Can now save out and open files. Woohoo! Was pretty aggravating when you couldn't. Even neater... Now opens from the clipboard with Ctrl-shift-O, which lets you select from your text editor and open in PGDT 1.11 without saving it out separately. Phew.

Welp, figured I ought to make some placeholder page for this thing. Somebody might want to link to this tool, and someday I might actually make an update that requires text like this. Anyhow, was finally starting to make a game, and I figured out coding endless bytes of #%11001110 for player graphics was really going to be a pain. Going back and editing the bytes isn't much fun either.

Enter one afternoon's coding in Java. Here's a quick screen grab of the result in Mac OS X and then Win2k. Each image is nearly 4-5 times as large as the app download:

Screenshot of grpx tool in OS X. Screenshot of grpx tool in Win2k.


Basically it's a limitless number of rows of eight checkboxes that spits out code like...
;============================
;  Player graphic data
;============================

        org $XX00
player0data
        byte #%10100000
        byte #%10001111
...
;============================
;  End player graphic data
;============================

... once you're done.  Very similar to the Chris Pepin's Visual Basic 3 Stella Graph app that was written to help you create a playfield some time back, but this app is a little more useful on a Mac (just b/c it's Java and VB doesn't run on a Mac).

Comments, bugs, etc to are appreciated.  Hope it's helpful to someone other than myself!  Check the readme to get this running; it's not yet a simple double-clickable jar file [on OSs that support that kind of thing].


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