Version History: 0.9.1pre10 FACTS - Free Advanced Creation/Translation System - The FORM Project has produced results, too! The new FACTS Offline Rendering Module is in place. It can render any .lvl into a PNG or set of PNGs. Send in your comments; we know this isn't quite perfect yet. * Requested by divine.216 0.9.1pre9 FACTS - Free Advanced Creation/Translation System - Now when you have AutoCheck enabled without AutoCorrect, FACE will highlight bad settings in red. This makes it much easier to see bad settings. You can select "Run CFGCheck" from the "Tools" menu to rescan all the settings and redo the red highlighting. - Clicking (or moving to) a red highlighted setting will display an error message instead of a description in the status bar. The error message explains what must be done to correct the error. 0.9.1pre8 FACTS - Free Advanced Creation/Translation System - Edit menu not present on "General Settings" page in FACE. You can't use it, so it shouldn't be there. - Changed FACE title bar to "FACTS Configuration Editor - C:\path\filename.ext" with a "*" at the end if the file has been changed. - Fixed a description running problem when the CFGCheck window is closed in FACE. - Added splash screen around CFGCheck in FACE, since it takes time to reload the settings. 0.9.1pre7 FACTS - Free Advanced Creation/Translation System - The FACE project has been completed! Now you'd like to know what it is, eh? The FACE project was the secret development project to bring you the next phase of FACTS: The FACTS Configuration Editor! - Moved development to VB6, since the FACE project has created new dependencies and code that compiles far better in VB6. Since more dependencies were being added, RichText has been added for the configuration checking routines. - FACE project highlights: - Spreadsheet-like ship configuration page, with full selection and copy-paste functionality. - Simple general settings page with spreadsheet- like layout and editing functionality. - Integrated AutoCheck functionality, with optional AutoCorrect, both thanks to ideas from CFGCheck. - Auto-loading of descriptions from any .set/.sss. - Live descriptions in the status bar. - Full Windows Registry support for saving settings, description file, and test file locations. 0.9.1pre6 FACTS - Free Advanced Creation/Translation System - Added Undo/Redo support to the "Edit Tiles" dialog. Now you can make a mistake or try things out. (Had to change a few things, but it shouldn't hurt much.) * requested by Arilou Lalee'lay 0.9.1pre5 FACTS - Free Advanced Creation/Translation System - Added Louis XV's CFGCheck program to the "Server" tab of the FACTS toolkit. This is the first of the various things that the new code base made possible. The CFGCheck program has been largely recoded to fit into FACTS as an integrated system, and as a result, it will also check .set files. (Inside FACTS, there is no difference.) * Thanks to Louis XV for his CFGCheck work. - The RichTextBox control in CFGCheck has been replaced with a standard TextBox control in this embedded version. If there are no objections, the RichTextBox will be put back, which will require another .OCX download. Still, it looks much better with color in the result log. 0.9.1pre4 FACTS - Free Advanced Creation/Translation System - Wiped out the entire .cfg/.set/.sss code base. Not one line was copied. The new (and much, much, much more logical) code will allow some amazing things. - Added GetExtension() to the filename manipulation library. No big deal, but it comes in handy. 0.9.1pre3 FACTS - Free Advanced Creation/Translation System - Added right-click copy to the custom WallTile dialog. Now it works just like the Tileset dialog. * requested by Shiningforce - Added "Horizontal" and "Vertical" labels to the Door Mode Calculator. Of course, the main reason is simply to differentiate the two sets of four. You could just as easily make two sets of one or the other, or you could even switch them, but the labels follow the standard customary vertical/horizontal setup. 0.9.1pre2 FACTS - Free Advanced Creation/Translation System - Added "Door Mode Calculator" to the "Server" tab. A thread on the server help site seemed to indicate such a feature would be nice, and so here it is. (It works both ways: door set <-> mode number.) 0.9.1pre1 FACTS - Free Advanced Creation/Translation System - And so it begins... again. This is the beginning of the next development series. Several things have been queued up, and the first of these are implemented now. - Added a "WallTiles" button to the Tile tab. This lets you create and edit WallTile definitions without going through the level editing items. * suggested by Shiningforce (although I had actually thought of this one before, he reminded me :) - Added confirmation to the WallTile dialog. If you click OK or Cancel without having saved changes you made to a WTD, it will ask you to confirm. Since "OK" does nothing for the new "WallTiles" button, it's a good idea to let the people know it won't save their work for them. 0.9.0 FACTS - Free Advanced Creation/Translation System - Packaged and uploaded. It's finally here. 0.9.0-final FACTS - Free Advanced Creation/Translation System - Fixed a race condition that would make the pasting highlight in the Edit Tiles dialog not go away. * bug caught by Shiningforce - This is officially the release version of FACTS-0.9.0. If any more bugs are caught and fixed before the final "FACTS-0.9.0.zip" hits the distribution server, they will be fixed and a new "-final-X" version released, but barring that, this will be the actual compile that will be released as "FACTS-0.9.0.exe". 0.9.0pre16 FACTS - Free Advanced Creation/Translation System - Fixed bug in the bitmap code. If the bitmap spec says a value can be zero (because you can compute it from other values), FACTS had better compute it from the other values if it is set to zero, eh? The bug affected the comment code, actually, but because of an error in the bitmap spec implementation. * bug caught by Shiningforce - Changed a description in the "Info" tab to be more in line with what people actually think. (What can we say? Programmers just aren't normal.) 0.9.0pre15 FACTS - Free Advanced Creation/Translation System - Fixed stale data bug or two in the custom walltile creation dialog. Hopefully this will take care of the stale data bugs, which are the last known bugs outstanding in the FACTS-0.9.0preX series. * bug caught by Shiningforce 0.9.0pre14 FACTS - Free Advanced Creation/Translation System - Fixed two bugs in the Custom WallTile dialog. - Reworked documentation. 0.9.0pre13 FACTS - Free Advanced Creation/Translation System - Woo-hoo! We are officially at feature freeze! Get those bug fixes in now... the only thing we have left to do is them and the documentation! - All file accesses should be reasonably safe now. Not all errors are acted on, but all errors should be caught. Detailed error handling should be added for 1.0, but for now, the fact that FACTS shouldn't die on errors will do. - The Diff code has been improved by such a very absolutely amazing amount, it's not even funny. It should take on the order of less than a minute to do the main loop now, while before it had been taking a very, very long time. - The MakePicture() bug in the "Edit Tiles" form should be gone. With the redesign and all, the offending code had likely already been eliminated. 0.9.0pre12 FACTS - Free Advanced Creation/Translation System - Added palette copying function to "Edit Tiles" dialog. You can now use the palette from any tileset in your custom tileset. (It might not be too useful, but it's a feature that might just come in handy to someone someday, and it only took about seven lines of code.) If you're using tiles from different colored (paletted, that is) tilesets, it'll probably look a bit ugly, but now YOU can decide which way you want it to be ugly. 0.9.0pre11 FACTS - Free Advanced Creation/Translation System - Another little showstopper: the "New Source" button in the "Edit Tiles" dialog should only change the custom tileset if the custom tileset is empty. (Oh, yeah, _inside_ the "If" block.) * bug caught by Shiningforce 0.9.0pre10 FACTS - Free Advanced Creation/Translation System - Nice little showstopper: the "Empty Tile" in the "Edit Tiles" dialog was not set up correctly. The X and Y values were backward in the "paste" code, and the Y was offset by one as well. It has been fixed now, and should function normally. * bug caught by Shiningforce - The new right-select code was not checking the tileset boundary values as it should, and so was creating error conditions in the tile copying routines. Now it won't try to copy past the edges. * bug caught by Shiningforce, I think 0.9.0pre9 FACTS - Free Advanced Creation/Translation System - Oh, this ought to be good. The kludged-in back end code in the tileset and WallTile dialogs has now been completely eradicated. And I wasn't even planning on doing that tonight. :) - Fixed right-click-copy in tileset manipulation dialog. It will now remember what you've copied with the right button, and it will continue to paste that correctly until such a time as you select something different. * corrections requested by Shiningforce - Added rollovers to the tilesets and status bars to the bottom of the tileset-using dialogs (not the tileset selection dialog, since you don't mess with that tileset window). Now FACTS has the single best feature of TileEdit -- it lets you know what tiles are what. * suggested by Shiningforce - Due to the complete redesign, there could be some outstanding issues with the tileset and WallTile dialogs. If you find any, let us know and we'll get right on it. 0.9.0pre8 FACTS - Free Advanced Creation/Translation System - Fixed a 1-byte offset in the comment embedding (and reading) code. Now it won't wipe out the top right corner pixel of the tileset. * bug caught by Shiningforce - Changed MakePicture() to assist in finding the annoying bug that's hiding in it somewhere. 0.9.0pre7 FACTS - Free Advanced Creation/Translation System - Added support for overlays and overlay diffs. - Overlay simply means to take all the tiles from a .lvl and place them over the corresponding spots on another .lvl. Note: if you try to overlay a tile on a spot covered by a space station or other multi-tile object, but not on the top, left corner tile, your tile will not be placed. - Overlay diffs in FACTS are like normal diffs (they catalog all the changes between two levels), but they cannot _remove_ any tiles. This is a design decision; in order to be able to remove tiles, you must necessarily break compatibility of the diff itself with SSME. FACTS overlay diffs _can_ be used just like normal .lvl files (they _are_ just normal .lvl's). - Note: If there is a use for non-editable diffs, we can add support for non-SSME-compatible FACTS diffs that will be able to remove tiles, too. - Support for removing information from tilesets has been added (but not tested). Hey, since we published the .bmp/.lvl specs, somebody would make a program to do it, and we had a space for another button, too. Anyway, don't pirate, but if you need to pull the info out, you should be able to. 0.9.0pre6 FACTS - Free Advanced Creation/Translation System - Added color signatures to WallTile Definition files. (They are currently in HTML's #RRGGBB format, but that isn't set in stone, yet.) Old .wtd's will work fine with 0.9.0pre6+, but 0.9.0pre6+ .wtd's won't work with pre5- unless the color signatures are hand edited out of the .wtd. - Added embedded comment support. FACTS can now embed text comments in tilesets (.bmp's or .lvl's with tilesets in them). I have tried commented tileset levels in my local test server, and they work just as normal levels do. Other graphics programs _may_ obliterate the comments, but they won't choke on them (as long as they follow the bitmap spec). - Note: Support for _removing_ comments was _not_ added. It is our philosophical position that there is not a need for that feature. You can change the comments (which can get rid of all but the FACTS version signature), but you cannot remove all the comments. If you want comment removal added to FACTS, let us know and we'll probably do it, but for now, we didn't think it was necessary (if you do find a program that requires comment-free files, we'll get that support in ASAP, so let us know). 0.9.0pre5 FACTS - Free Advanced Creation/Translation System - Fixed the UI. Now tab key cycles through the buttons in order, and all the buttons have "tooltip" info in the staus bar at the bottom. - Added "Example" WallTile set to WallTile selection dialog. This should help new users know what goes where without having to go to the papers. * Suggestion by Shiningforce. 0.9.0pre4 FACTS - Free Advanced Creation/Translation System - Long time no see. I know this one was a long time coming. This will officially begin the second season of active FACTS development. (It's amazing what real life will throw at you, but coders never give up.) Updates should come faster again now that the team is playing again. - Serious UI redesign. New "info buttons" added. It's tabbed, too. The "info buttons" are not yet implemented, but the look is there. (Implementation in progress, but requiring a major back-end redesign.) - Added right-click (or drag) in top tile manipulation window. The right button in the top will "copy" tiles from itself (pasted via the left button, as always). Now you can not only paste to the custom tileset, but you can copy within it as well. * Requested by Shiningforce 0.9.0pre3 FACTS - Free Advanced Creation/Translation System - Added logic to find diagonals such as the one in the inside of a cut corner when there's only one diagonal tile on the inside and two on the outside. (This will likely be the last of the fixes from the intense diagonal studying I've been working on.) 0.9.0pre2 FACTS - Free Advanced Creation/Translation System - Fixed the "boot" artifact problem (a "|\" instead of a "\\" where a diagonal intersects a line). Of course, the fix breaks when you run a diagonal into a two-or-more tile thick wall, but fixing that isn't as important, since that is a much more difficult situation (and it doesn't matter at all if you only have diagonals intersecting one-tile thick walls). 0.9.0pre1 FACTS - Free Advanced Creation/Translation System - Added tileset manipulation dialog. - Standardized temp file handling throughout FACTS. - Added more buttons to UI (even includes an "About"-style button now). 0.8.0 FACTS - Free Advanced Creation/Translation System - The first official release of the new WallTile system and tileset previewing dialogs. Woo-hoo! - Fixed WallTile definition loading functions. They should now handle the entire set of badly composed .wtd files. - Fixed preview support of tilesets with fewer than ten rows (can't release a new version that can't load _castle.lvl's tiles -- it wouldn't be right). - Fixed bug caused by Microsoft inconsistency in using or not using "\" at the end of a path. * bug caught by Snarklord 0.8.0pre18 FACTS - Free Advanced Creation/Translation System - Release candidate: FACTS-0.8.0rc7. - Completed merging all conversion optimizations into the final tree. With the changes merged in this version, the 3:25 pre15 time has been cut to 40 SECONDS total for the 100 maps. Total savings in non-WallTile sections: over 80%! 0.8.0pre17 FACTS - Free Advanced Creation/Translation System - Release candidate: FACTS-0.8.0rc6. - Fixed the solo tile bug. mods.lvl, one of the TrenchWars levels running on April 1st, had only one tile (a wormhole) and thus found a division by zero error (and a bunch of wanna-be-mods). (We mean it when we say FACTS should work for EVERY .lvl -- even the abnormal ones.) - Conversion logic improved again. Cut time 55%. A 100 conversion benchmark on FACTS-0.8.0pre15 ran in about 3:25, in pre16 it ran in 2:45, and now in pre17 it runs in 1:30. That's a savings of almost two whole minutes for the non-WallTile bitmap to level conversion of the 100 maps (or, using my figures, 55% shaved off the non-WallTile conversion overhead). 0.8.0pre16 FACTS - Free Advanced Creation/Translation System - Release candidate: FACTS-0.8.0rc5. - Conversion logic improved. This change cut 20% off the non-WallTile processing time (not quite as substantial when using WallTiles, but it did cut 40 seconds off a 100-map batch conversion). 0.8.0pre15 FACTS - Free Advanced Creation/Translation System - Release candidate: FACTS-0.8.0rc4. - The "Re-Link" button won't be enabled after an operation if the "Use WallTiles" checkbox is not checked. - 0.8.0pre15-1 replaced the old docs with new ones. 0.8.0pre14 FACTS - Free Advanced Creation/Translation System - Release candidate: FACTS-0.8.0rc3. - Found and fixed Cancel bug in "Split Tiles". - Added cancel functionality to the title bar of the "New BMP" map/tile selection dialog. 0.8.0pre13 FACTS - Free Advanced Creation/Translation System - Release candidate: FACTS-0.8.0rc2. - Fixed Cancel bug in "Add Desc" routines. * bug caught by Snarklord 0.8.0pre12 FACTS - Free Advanced Creation/Translation System - Reached "release candidate" status: FACTS-0.8.0rc1. - Fixed "Clear Current" to clear the entire current WallTile (it had been missing the first tile). - Added check for the continued existence of the last loaded .wtd before attempting to reload it when returning to the WallTile dialog. - Cleaned up display of WallTile dialog to not show a partially drawn form. It will now make sure the form is fully drawn before populating it with WallTiles, and no leftovers from the last loaded .wtd will flash by the top. 0.8.0pre11 FACTS - Free Advanced Creation/Translation System - Added support for "Tile Zero". The WallTile definiton dialog now has a special "hole" tile above the top, left corner of the tileset. The "hole" tile will show up in the WallTile as a teeny picture of the tileset palette (so it can't be confused). "Tile Zero" is not rendered in the conversion. - Fixed the extra tiles for large asteroids, space stations, and wormholes to be the right pixel values in deconverted bitmaps. 0.8.0pre10 FACTS - Free Advanced Creation/Translation System - NOTE: WallTile definition files (.wtd's) from version 0.8.0pre9 will not work with this version. The tile numbers have been shifted up one in order to be consistent with the TileEdit and .lvl file numbering schemes. (And of course, the .wtd's from before 0.8.0pre9 won't work at all, since they used the old "Expert" dialog.) - Removed the last vestiges of the original static WallTile and diagonal definitions. There is now only one "Use WallTiles" checkbox on the main form. (It made no sense to take one arbitrary pattern and declare it to be above all the others, especially since it is definitely nowhere near as useful as any given user-defined layout.) - Linked the "Re-Link" buttons status to the "Use WallTiles" checkbox. (If you have no WallTiles, you have nothing to re-link.) - Without a given WallTile being defined, FACTS will simply ignore that palette entry ("color") in the map .bmp -- this means that if you uncheck the "Use WallTiles" checkbox, your WalLTiles will not be rendered in the .lvl (could be fun if you want to see how much of your map is WallTiles). Before this version, FACTS would always convert the original eight WallTiles; now it won't. - Changed default status of "Use WallTiles" checkbox to "checked". It just seemed like the right thing to do, since FACTS basically _is_ WallTiles. 0.8.0pre9 FACTS - Free Advanced Creation/Translation System - Oh, my! Added the code from our "Hero UI" project to the FACTS tree. The previous Expert dialog box is no more; its functionality has been absorbed into the new, amazing dialog codenamed "Hero UI". - The "Hero UI" dialog necessitated changes throughout the FACTS code. Many changes were put in place prior to pre9, but quite a bit of code was changed in the merge as well. - FACTS now supports a completely arbitrary number of WallTiles (up to 32), and they can be composed of any tiles in the tileset. Diagonals are optional on a per-WallTile basis. - The map .bmp pallette was changed to accomodate the addition of 24 new WallTiles. - Diagonal status is now stored in an array of Boolean values. The previous bitmapped format broke down when we found out VB overflows when trying to compute 2^31 AND 2^31. - The WallTile definition files (.wtd's) are plain text and can be edited in Notepad or whatever. If you're going to do a 32 WallTile redundant set, the text rules. - 0.8.0pre9-1 added a "- 1" to make FACTS use the right number of WallTiles, also fixed non-expert diagonals. 0.8.0pre8 FACTS - Free Advanced Creation/Translation System - Re-fixed a couple bugs that apparently fell through when a patch was applied to an old source file instead of the correct, current one. (Must... have... sleep...) * bugs re-caught by Shiningforce 0.8.0pre7 FACTS - Free Advanced Creation/Translation System - Fixed the cancel (i.e., [x]) button in the Expert dialog box to work more logically. (Is it done yet?) * continued bug reports by Shiningforce :) 0.8.0pre6 FACTS - Free Advanced Creation/Translation System - Changed version from 0.7.1preX to 0.8.0preX. The scale of the changes and significance of the new features added in this series warrant a change in version numbers. - Completed the back end code for processing an arbitrary number of arbitrarily mapped WallTiles. The front end code (the Custom dialog) is now in development under the code name "Hero UI". 0.7.1pre5 FACTS - Free Advanced Creation/Translation System - Continued modification to back end code, this time to add partial support for more (or less) than eight WallTiles (for the future "Custom" dialog). - Added [x] button to the title bar of the "Expert" dialog. Cancelling the dialog will revert to whatever selection existed before it popped up. * idea by Shiningforce - Added refresh of the preview dialog on activation to get rid of a stale files (i.e., if you delete a file with FACTS running, it should not still show up when you return to the preview dialog). * bug caught by Shiningforce 0.7.1pre4 FACTS - Free Advanced Creation/Translation System - Radically redesigned the WallTile <-> real tile associations. Now uses an array to map the values instead of having them hard-coded. With this design, FACTS will be able to support the upcoming Custom tileset configuration feature. - 0.7.1pre4-1 fixed one digit in conversions and made the "Expert" dialog only show up when appropriate. 0.7.1pre3 FACTS - Free Advanced Creation/Translation System - Added "Re-Link" function to FACTS. Basically, what this does is deconverts and re-converts a .lvl (it's a .lvl->.lvl conversion). By doing this, you can add or remove diagonals, or "Re-Link" all the WallTiles in the map (useful if you messed with it in SSME or whatever, since you can use any WallTile of a group to draw, and then just "Re-Link" it into a finished .lvl. * requested by Shiningforce - An error in the WallTile set deconversion was detected thanks to the new "Re-Link" function, and was promptly corrected (54 to _57_ is four tiles, not to 58, duh). - Merged the buttons for new map .bmp's and new tileset .bmp's into one button (to make room for "Re-Link" on one of the buttons). 0.7.1pre2 FACTS - Free Advanced Creation/Translation System - Finally added the tileset previewing function to FACTS. Now you can see a bit of what you're doing. * requested by Shiningforce - Moved "Expert" dialog. Instead of popping up on click, it now pops up after selecting the tileset in the new preview-enabled tileset selection dialog. This is more logical, and will be necessary when the "Custom" dialog is implemented. - Added a "Use this for all deconversions." checkbox to the "Expert" dialog, visible only when deconverting multiple .lvl's (the only case where multiple tilesets are involved in one process). - Fixed the "Info" window to only .Show the form once per processing task instead of once per file. 0.7.1pre1 FACTS - Free Advanced Creation/Translation System - Changed FACTS source to use comdlg32.dll instead of comdlg32.ocx. Everyone with Windows has comdlg32.dll, but not everyone had comdlg32.ocx. *** >0.7.1pre1-1 uses the .ocx due to errors *** - Added load/save to "Expert" WallTile/diagonal selection dialog box (also added disabled "Custom" button for future custom-mapped tileset feature). * suggested by Shiningforce - Made "Expert" dialog box modal (works better this way). 0.7.0 FACTS - Free Advanced Creation/Translation System - Fixed bug in expert diagonal selection routine. - Rebranded final version as "FACTS - SubSpace.net" instead of "FACTS - ss.ClayJar.com" as part of a cross-promotional deal. Prerelease versions will remain at ss.ClayJar.com, and releases will be distrubuted from SubSpace.net (in association with ss.ClayJar.com). - 0.7.0-1 fixed one digit in conversions and a bit of text. * bug caught by Shiningforce - 0.7.0-2 fixed another bug in expert diagonal selection. The conversion routines were not functioning properly, due to a stupid mistake (I have to use _both_ variables). * bug caught by Shiningforce 0.7.0pre5 FACTS - Free Advanced Creation/Translation System - Polished off parts of the UI. (Now always asks for tilesets _after_ .bmp, .lvl, or whatever... nothing like consistency, eh?) - Added very basic size checks for .bmp's. If it's bigger than 50K or so, it can't be a tileset. If it's smaller than about 1026K or so, it can't be a map. 0.7.0pre4 FACTS - Free Advanced Creation/Translation System - Fixed "first tile" bug. If at least one WallTile was not being used, and the top left tile (tile offset 0) was not a WallTile later than the unused WallTile, the top left tile would be incorrectly changed to the last unused WallTile. Now if there are no WallTiles of a particular kind, the routine won't even go through the loop once (those who have done such things with "For" loops have permission to snicker, but only for a few moments). * bug caught by Shiningforce 0.7.0pre3 FACTS - Free Advanced Creation/Translation System - Added "Border tile" (tile 20) to the tileset (the first WallTile's diagonal was using it, which was wrong; also added it to the level map .bmp palette; shifted WallTile diagonals to not use tile 20). * bug caught by Shiningforce - Fixed example tileset diagonals (missing six dots). * bug caught by Shiningforce - Fixed "Apply Tiles" button (now it doesn't become two lines when selected or clicked). * bug caught by Shiningforce 0.7.0pre2 FACTS - Free Advanced Creation/Translation System - Added diagonal support to WallTile technology. - Custom tileset now included in package (it doesn't look great, but it gets the job done and is a good example). - 0.7.0pre2-1 added an icon to the program (at last). 0.7.0pre1 FACTS - Free Advanced Creation/Translation System - Added WallTile technology for rapid level creation. 0.6.1 FACTS - Free Advanced Creation/Translation System - Found and fixed a one-byte offset which showed up thanks to the new, faster (de)conversion routines. - Found a bug which prevents map bitmaps with quite excessively large tile counts from converting properly. (If you found this bug, you ought to cut back a bit.) 0.6.0 FACTS - Free Advanced Creation/Translation System - Now logically handles .bmp pixel order when converting to .lvl -- as such, it is no longer necessary to sort the tiles on load, which obviously is somewhat helpful in the quest for performance. - Implemented shell sort (as opposed to bubble sort) in several routines (mostly in the .set<->.cfg areas). (Hey, I had to look it up! Sosumi! :) - Cleaned up the "apply descriptions" logic; now it's a _whole_ lot faster. 0.6.0pre3 FACTS - Free Advanced Creation/Translation System - Seriously improved conversion speed in several places. It had been bound by inefficient I/O calls; now mostly bound by inefficient sorting algorithms. :) - Standardized method of creating new filenames if the target filename already exists. 0.6.0pre2 FACTS - Free Advanced Creation/Translation System - Fixed bug in the blank tileset creation routines. (The .bmp header wasn't being written correctly since version 0.5.0! If you find bugs like this, please let me know of them ASAP!) - Tremendously cleaned up user interface code, which had become unwieldy. Now it's all nice and pretty again, and a bunch of midnight code has been replaced with much more intuitive routines. 0.6.0pre1 FACTS - Free Advanced Creation/Translation System - Added initial support for conversions between .set and .cfg files (thanks to Mine GO BOOM for the suggestion). - Converts .cfg to .set (no descriptions or with descriptions pulled from .sss or .set file). - Converts .set to .cfg (descriptions can be included as comments in the generated .cfg). - Adds descriptions from .sss or .set file to an existing .set file. - All .set/.cfg functions are batch-enabled. ------------------------------------------------------------- 0.5.0 FACTS - Free Advanced Creation/Translation System - This is it! Every feature that was supposed to make it into FACTS has made it. Expect slight changes and improvements, not to mention bugfixes, but as of now, FACTS is really worth a download. - Fixed lots of insidious bugs... and tested even. - Now compares two calculated filesizes to detect extraneous bytes (_melted.lvl AND _castle.lvl both had this problem, and _castle.lvl has a nine row tileset, too!) - All operations checked and rechecked (and I should even have the right file in the distribution, too) - Added batch processing of Convert, Deconvert, Apply, and Split routines. - Streamlined UI with respect to clicks. There are no more windows that pop up and require a click to continue during an operation. - Info window added. This is where batch progress is displayed, as well as non-error messages from within the conversion routines (i.e., if you include a level without a tileset in a Split batch, you will get a warning here, and no operation on the level will be performed). - Many "percent" progress indicators added. There were a few places where certain steps could take longer than normal (splitting a _large_ level), so "percent" indicators were added throughout. This also aids the responsiveness of the windows to dragging, resizing, and all around responding. - Input files for various operations are now required to exist. (It seems like a good idea, eh?) - Overwrite prompt added to "Map BMP" and "Tile BMP", since these create a new file using user input. - Added checks for file size and correct bitmap headers. (Width is important, but you could probably make a map with extra information above the 1024-pixel high line and still convert it... for now. More rigorous checks may be added later, but since there are known cases of bad files working in SubSpace, I'd be reluctant to require them.) - Various details have continued to be worked on, but they are mostly tweaks and code cleanup, not UI stuff. 0.4.4-1 FACTS - Free Advanced Creation/Translation System - Conversion Unity Release: EVERY SubSpace .lvl I have can now be converted successfully! Screenshots of each tileset and map are available in the download directory of FACTS at http://ss.ClayJar.com/ 0.4.4 FACTS - Free Advanced Creation/Translation System - Now asks you is you want to wipe the tileset pallette (Some tilesets use non-standard pallettes) - Added support for tilesets with fewer than 10 rows (i.e., in _castle.lvl) and tilesets that are just a little bit wrong (i.e. removes the two extraneous bytes from _melted.lvl) (Tilesets of less than 10 rows cannot yet have their tilesets wiped; this will be addressed in 0.4.4-1.) 0.4.3 FACTS - Free Advanced Creation/Translation System - Deconversion routines now add "dummy pixels" to mark the layout of extended tiles (wormholes now show up as 5x5 patches in the .bmp, but only the pixel at the upper left which is a slightly different color is translated) *Note: normal 1x1 tiles end at index 190 (the 191'st color, since the first is index 0), and with the exception of 216 (small asteroid), 217 (large asteroid), 219 (starport), and 220 (wormhole), all colors above index 190 in the pallette are ignored in the translation to a SubSpace .lvl - Blank level .bmp pallette changed slightly to make the "dummy pixel" patches possible, as well as to make the asteroid pixels brown (hey, it ought to help a little) - Fixed a one tile offset in the deconversion routines (nothing like a little detailed testing to weed out little bugs here and there) 0.4.2-2 FACTS - Free Advanced Creation/Translation System - Slightly changed progress computation for readability and incremental speed increase, and added slight tweaks in the display routines to prevent ugliness. - Now changes the pallette of tilesets split from .lvl files to the standard SubSpace pallette. (The tileset from the original Trench Wars map, trenchrd.lvl, had a black-and-white pallette, which made it somewhat difficult to work with; now that can't happen.) 0.4.2-1 FACTS - Free Advanced Creation/Translation System - Fixed little problem by reading tile placement data by starting AFTER the embedded tileset, if such a tileset exists. Call me dumb, but I'm only here to help. :) 0.4.2 FACTS - Free Advanced Creation/Translation System - Rewrote deconversion routines (it now generates a standard blank level and then places the individual tile pixels afterward) - Changes yielded a large speed increase and more stable and readable deconversion routines 0.4.1 FACTS - Free Advanced Creation/Translation System - Fixed show stopper bug in deconversion routine 0.4.0 FACTS - Free Advanced Creation/Translation System - Added the ability to convert .lvl to .bmp (embedded tileset, if present, is saved as an additional .bmp) - Internal code has been somewhat restructured - Official announcement of FACTS distribution will likely occur with this release. We are still calling it "alpha" or "beta", since we anticipate doing a great number of improvements before we call it a version 1.0, but we believe it is both usable and _useful_ as of this version. ------------------------------------------------------------- 0.3.0 FACTS - Free Advanced Creation/Translation System - Renamed from BMP2LVL to FACTS; the addition of tileset support expanded the program from being a simple translator to being a complete creation system - Added tileset support including: - Generating a blank tileset .bmp (uses the standard SubSpace pallette) - Adding a tileset to a level (.lvl) file (source can be .bmp or .lvl with tileset) - Splitting a .lvl with tileset into a .bmp tileset and a plain .lvl ------------------------------------------------------------- 0.2.0 BMP2LVL - Added ability to generate a blank bitmap to edit - Added basic pallette for generated bitmaps - Added support of special tiles (remove overlaps) ------------------------------------------------------------- 0.1.0 BMP2LVL - "Proof of concept" version - Converted bitmaps to levels ------------------------------------------------------------- 0.0.0 Concept - Researched .bmp and .lvl file formats - Performed manual adjustments -------------------------------------------------------------