extracting shapes as PNG

[Andrea B Previtera]

I think I am posting this twice but...
...you know, my memory has serious holes :\

I wanted to know if there's a way to batch-extract shapes in PNG format. I can do it in GIF with the Exult tools and some codearound... but no PNG. Am I wrong? Any hint?

[edit by wjp: you should really give threads descriptive subjects ]

[Dominus]

The problem is that the shapes normally contain more than one frame and png only supports one frame (shot me if I'm wrong).
The prefered way to handle these files is really the shp format and using Gimp. This way you can see the frames way better.

[Andrea B Previtera]

Hm, ok - I didn't actually mean Shapes but Frames. Infact you *can* extract every frame with the exult tools... only they're saved in PCX... GIF... or something like that

[Dominus]

yeah it works fine extracting frames to pcx. Ipack might be extendable to extract all frames of a shape and save them to png.
I'm sure there are tools to batch convert pcx to pngs. In Windows you can use irfan view to do this (supports command line batch converting, I think).

[wjp]

Or you could adapt the shp2pcx utility to shp2png.

[Imajin]

Actually I rigged up a simple method once...

If you have the Exult tools, copy "SHAPES.VGA" (for example) and PALLETES.FLX to that folder, and make two files in Notepad.

One should be a batch (.bat) file with one line:
ipack -x test.txt

Name the other test.txt, and put the following lines into it:
archive SHAPES.VGA
palette PALETTES.FLX
xxx/32: /

Relace XXX with the shape number, which I beleive can be discovered in Exult Studio. Also, the 32 is the number of frames the average character shape has (Remember, though Studio says 31, 0 is counted in that). Other shapes may have mroe or less.

[Andrea B Previtera]

The point is that when IPack extracts frames to PCX, the transparency mask is lost! Otherwise of course I'd be batch converting to PNG...

[drcode]

Ipack is losing transparency info? That's a bug.

[Andrea B Previtera]

Yes, pcx files (at least with the last Ipack I used! I don't know now) haven't transparency information

[drcode]

I thought ipack produced .png's.

[Colourless]

Are you sure that you are not making a mistake. If there isn't transparency information in the format, then the transparent colour is Index 255.

[Andrea B Previtera]

Maybe it's just a photoshop glitch then - since PNG and GIF files are correctly transparency-masked once loaded, while PCX files are not..

[Andrea B Previtera]

After PCX dissection I can confirm it: no transparency info!
Is there any hope of PNG output with some future release of the tools?

[Andrea .B. Previtera]

Hee-hoo! Here we go with the monthly call about PNG output from the Exult tools Sorry, it's not plain lazyness: I'd happily contribute to the code and add it by myself, but I should learn the png format, how to compile exult, etc. etc. - which I really don't have time to : (

Any kind soul out there?

[drcode]

You can look at Exult's use of the PNG library in the 'shapes' directory.

[Withstand the Fury Dragon]

What about IrfanView? Doesn't that do batch conversions between format with the option to preserve transparency?

http://www.irfanview.com/

WtFD

[Withstand the Fury Dragon]

EDIT: I thought it let me define a transparent colour for each image, as well. In fact, I recall as much, because it helped me do some PNG image-compression (with preservation of transparency) for a friend's website.

WtFD