[epiar-devel] Animation Tool

[Christopher Thielen]

I disagree. Part of the idea behind writing our own UI for Epiar is that it would benefit both from development in Reipel and development in Epiar. Ultimately, we could produce a UI that works fast and well, and has the widgets and organizational complexity we need. After all, if every other DOS program in 1992 wrote their own UI, I'm sure we're more than capable. :-)

That said, I'd also like to state that wxWidgets, QT, and GTK+ are, from my experience, overly complicated and oddly designed (most UIs are). wxWidgets, in particular, is rather hard to debug should something actually go wrong after the compile, and it seems awfully silly to have built a cross platform UI only to add another cross platform UI to the dependency list.

I also suggest we consider a different name for the Epiar Editor (and no, 'Epiar Editor' is not an okay name). Epiar Mission Builder is an alright name. It doesn't have to be an arbitrary name, e.g. Reipel.

My idea for ... well let's just call it Epiar Mission Builder, or EMB for now, was to have it mainly be a tool for working with the scenarios (and/or missions) themselves in a graphical manner (if anyone's ever used the Descent: Freespace-included Editor, that's a pretty close model), but it would also include a number of smaller built-in utilities, accessible via the top menu, to do things like work with the Epiar archive format (which at this point, looks like it won't be the .eaf but something like .tgz or whatever PhysicsFS supports), or build .ani files, etc.

EMB (or maybe just EB?) is a task that I wanted to take and start building for 0.3.0, because that's both a good time to build it (file formats stabilizing, we'll need it before too long after that, etc.), and (don't take this the wrong way), but I've already built an Epiar before, so I'm more interested in this new bit. :-)

- Chris

On Dec 8, 2009, at 6:41 AM, Maoserr wrote:

> I was actually just thinking about writing a log file parser in python.
> 
> In the future when we go about writing Reipel (or however it's pronouned),  
> I have a few suggestions on how I think this could work
> 1) I believe the .ani parser and log file parser could all be part of the  
> Reipel program (the map editor), so we might want to start another  
> repository for that
> 2) There's a few ways we could go about implementing reipel, but I would  
> suggest we use WxWidgets or QT to implement the GUI rather than using SDL  
> as it seems better suited for an editor program
> 3) The Reipel program could accept python modules (like the .ani parser  
> and log parser) and so we have a uniform interface (of course it wouldn't  
> hurt also if we can just run the python programs standalone.
> 
> Of course this is not going to happen anytime soon, but just some thoughts.
> 
> On Tue, 08 Dec 2009 02:49:40 -0500, Matthew Zweig <thezweig at gmail.com>  
> wrote:
> 
>> Hi Epiar Developers,
>> 
>> I just wrote a short .ani parser so that we can pack, unpack and edit  
>> the Animation files.
>> 
>> The tool will take some.ani and convert it into a some_unpacked folder  
>> that includes the png files and the metadata (order and delay).  The  
>> tool should accept any folder with png files in it to make a .ani file,  
>> but you can define the order and delay if you want by including an  
>> order.txt and delay.txt respectively.
>> 
>> To unpack all Epiar animations, run:
>> 	Source/tools/ani.py Resources/Animations/*
>> 
>> To pack these files back up after editing:
>> 	Source/tools/ani.py *_unpacked
>> 	mv -f *.ani Resources/Animations/
>> 
>> Although the it should work fine without any options, it has a few  
>> override/format/output options and a fairly complete --help.
>> 
>> Some caveats:
>> 	The tool requires python.
>> 	The tool does not expand '*' characters passed to it, so shells like  
>> cmd.exe may not work as expected.
>> 	The tool doesn't have any idea what a .png file actually looks like, so  
>> if you rename a .jpeg as .png, it will happily pack it for you.  Epiar  
>> probably won't like it though.
>> 
>> Let me know what you think,
>> ~Matt
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> 
> 
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