Thwarted
September 9th, 2008
I've been thinking about revamping the pipeline through which artwork gets into my games. I have a pretty efficient system that lets me attach hotspots to in game graphics (sprites), strips out the transparent borders and packs them into neat packages for later compression by my game file packer which creates a file I call a blob (historical reasons - I believe the acronym was Build Lots Of Banks when I was using a similar tool when working with Realtime Associates way back when). At the end of the day I have a single large data file, the blob, which is all that the user ever sees. For rapid development the Rusty Axe file system will load new files directly from the game directory before looking into the blob so that the blob doesn't always have to be rebuilt for trivial data updates.
The problem is that I would like artists and end users to be able to modify graphics and extend Rusty Axe games with game editors. The game editor for Real E$tate Empire was rarely used and I place part of the blame on the fact that there wasn't a dead simple way to just drop in new town layouts and new houses. The biggest issue here is that I want to maintain the concept of having a hotspot that a given graphic gets drawn around. I was pondering this Sunday AM before blasting off to the golf course (end of season club championship, always a lot of fun) when I had the bright idea that there is probably a text field in a PNG file where an editor I might write could stuff hotspot information. Neat. So I popped online and found that sure enough there is such a field. BTW, you can view PNG file chunks with this handy tool:
tweakPNG.
So I was off to the races. The only thing left to check was whether popular graphics editors would actually preserve this data. My first test was with my new copy of Photoshop Elements which I picked up last summer because its' image selection tools are much improved from the archaic version of Photoshop that I own. A simple load and resave of a PNG file with a comment embedded shows that, sadly, PSE blows the comments field clean away.
I've got some other ideas for how to allow end users to easily drop PNG's into forthcoming Rusty Axe games but I'm disappointed that PSE does this as it would have been a neat way to tag additional info. into graphics files.
Work on Big$hot progresses. The AI's are getting smarter and will have more personality than those of Real E$tate Empire. I hope to be posting a free playable demo sometime in September, most likely using igLoader so that players can play the demo right in their browser.
Peace-out.
L.
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