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Graphics > Good graphic conversion utilities for Mac Os X?

#27410 - lgo - Tue Oct 12, 2004 1:52 pm

Hello,

Does anyone know any good graphic convertors for Mac Os X ? The ones listed on www.gbadev.org don't really fulfill all my needs, and before starting to write my own converters / utilities I thought just to ask here.

The ones I have tried are velvet's imgconverter that can only convert to an binary form and doesn't know anything about tiles.

I'm looking for something like gfx2gba on Windows or Linux.

All help is appreciated, so that my efforts will not be "wasted" on writing these utilities.

#27411 - poslundc - Tue Oct 12, 2004 2:11 pm

I am not aware of any other Mac image converters; I know I've had to write my own for all of my projects.

That said, I have to emphatically assure you that your efforts in writing your own image converters will NOT be wasted. While it sucks to reinvent the wheel, image converters aren't too time-consuming to write, and they offer two HUGE advantages:

1. You will learn a lot of important stuff about how the GBA handles its data by writing them. This is stuff you'll definitely need later on if you're making a full game. Not to mention when it comes time for you to convert other forms of data, like maps and sound.

2. You won't be restricted by the limitations of other graphics converters. The GBA has a lot of different ways of handling its data, and most publically available converters try to shoehorn you into processing your graphics a certain way. I've written a software-driven sprite scaler that requires sprites to be stored in a very specific format that I guarantee no other converter exports to, but all I had to do was tweak a couple of lines in the source of my sprite converter in order to generate that format.

So I highly recommend you go the route of writing your own. It's much more rewarding that way in the long run.

Dan.

#27461 - lgo - Wed Oct 13, 2004 10:55 am

Thanks for your reply poslundc. You're a Mac user ?

If so, what technologies have you used while writing your tools ?

I was thinking of maybe using Quicktime to import the image data and then convert to a format that can be used with the GBA. Or maybe use SDL_Image or some other image library to read the data.

The actual conversion should not be so hard to do.

And I'm also pondering what language to use .. I have done some tools with Python (which is the fastest way to develop for me), but in the long run it could be beneficial to use Objective-C or just C.

#27463 - poslundc - Wed Oct 13, 2004 2:14 pm

lgo wrote:
Thanks for your reply poslundc. You're a Mac user ?


Yes.

Quote:
If so, what technologies have you used while writing your tools ?


The two main ones I use are PHP and Objective-C. 90% of my tools are written in PHP, for three reasons:

1. It's a good quick-and-dirty, hack-and-slash scripting language that I can run from any web browser.

2. It has excellent, (essentially) built-in support for image handling, so it's really easy to open images that I generate in Photoshop or whatever, grab their palettes/pixmaps and play with them.

3. I've used it a lot and can write code very quickly with it.

I imagine that you would find Python appropriate for similar reasons (my Python experience is limited but I expect it has an image-manipulation module you can add on, whether it's GD (which PHP uses) or something else).

The only project I've had to use Objective-C for was my map editor, since none of the web browsers on my computer could juggle the vast quantity of images I needed and I couldn't just process them server-side at a reasonable speed either. That was a bit of a pain as it took me a while to figure out how to get at the raw pixel data of an image, but once I got the hang of it the development proceeded relatively smoothly from there.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot the one tool I wrote in straight C to run in the terminal was my MOD encoder for my music player. Just because it needed to be fast and because it was more convenient accessing the raw byte-data in C than it would've been in PHP.

Dan.

#27465 - Abscissa - Wed Oct 13, 2004 2:56 pm

poslundc wrote:
2. It has excellent, (essentially) built-in support for image handling, so it's really easy to open images that I generate in Photoshop or whatever, grab their palettes/pixmaps and play with them.


Really? I'll have to take a look.

#27467 - poslundc - Wed Oct 13, 2004 3:03 pm

http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.image.php

GD makes playing with images relatively simple.

Dan.

#27487 - crossraleigh - Wed Oct 13, 2004 10:50 pm

I also use a Mac, and I also am (beginning to) think it's nice to write tailored tools for graphics conversion, but it's worth being aware that there are other tools out there.

You said you looked on the main site, so I guess you already saw sealFin's conversion tools, but I'll mention them just in case. TileMax by Sean Reid works well for map, tile, and sprite conversion. There is also GBASpriteEditor?really more of an editor with conversion plug-ins, but still quite nice.

It hasn't been suggested and might mean trouble (I consistently have problems with so called "portable" code that assumes a little-endian target.), but you might try porting open-source converters from Linux or Windows.

#27502 - lgo - Thu Oct 14, 2004 7:34 am

crossraleigh wrote:

You said you looked on the main site, so I guess you already saw sealFin's conversion tools, but I'll mention them just in case. TileMax by Sean Reid works well for map, tile, and sprite conversion. There is also GBASpriteEditor?really more of an editor with conversion plug-ins, but still quite nice.

It hasn't been suggested and might mean trouble (I consistently have problems with so called "portable" code that assumes a little-endian target.), but you might try porting open-source converters from Linux or Windows.


Yeah, I have tried the sealFin's conversion tools, but I find them awkward and couldn't really be bothered more with them. And I actually have used TileMax for my first project, but it has some problems too..

I'll have try out GBASpriteEditor, from the screenshots it looks good.

Thanks for your replies, but It seems that it would be best to write my own tools, so that I can tailor them to my own needs.