OBJECT ANIMATION OFFSET EDITOR VERSION 1.0. Written by Carl Wooltorton for Games Programmers Everywhere (Email woolto_c@kultarr.cs.uwa.edu.au or zodiac@tartarus.uwa.edu.au) Have you ever been writing a game using sprites? If so then there's a good chance you can use this little tool. I had some graphics for a rotating space-ship made from 3 sprites which was to rotate, but the ship itself was bigger than a 16x16 sprite. As a result, the sprite used by the ship could not be positioned by positioning the sprite itself (the data was not centred in the sprite), but needed a table of offsets to determine the position. And that is what this program allows you to create! This program allows you to load in your data (in the form of an IFF picture), manipulate an initially empty table of offsets, and write out the table for use by your programs. A number of assumptions are made by the program. These are: o The IFF picture must be the same or smaller than a 320x250 screen, and must be LOWRES with 4 colours. o The program's configuration must be in the present directory, otherwise the default will be written and used. Apart from that, you should be able to work out how everything works. I have included an example IFF file that will be useful also. Try loading the program and setting room for 21 sprites, and try the following sequence on the file "example.IFF". 1) Use the cursor keys to move the sprite so that the cyan dot is under the white dot (the alignment dot). 2) Press '2' and repeat until all 21 sprites are aligned. 3) Press space to enter the configuration editor, then try the following settings (Press space to return, then animate using 8, 9 and 0) : Object Start : 1 Object End : 5 Difference Between : 1 Try animation 0. Object Start : 6 Object End : 21 Difference Between : 2 Try any animation...Also try starting the animation on different sprites. As you can see, 8 is a forward animation, 9 is backward, and 0 goes back and then forward. When the difference is > 1, try starting the animation with different current frame numbers. To save the offset table, press from the main screen. This program has NOT been extensively tested. It has been written on an Amiga 500 with 1Meg and 1.3 Kickstart so there should be no problems. It was written using Amos Creator...the version issued by CU Amiga some time ago (Thanks!). The structure of the data saved is in BYTES, since an offset of > 255 is ludicrous. The structure follows an XYXY... format. If you use this program, then please mention it in your game/demo/whatever. If you'd like to drop me a line, I'd love to hear from you, and any suggestions you have are most welcome. If the response is big enough, I may make an update. Please send in bug reports and any problems you have also. Good programming! Carl. (See top of this file for Email addresses!)