Adventures in GrafX2 Scripting

I'm currently working on a little game project. Since I want a relatively polished result, I have a lot of art assets to make. I'm spending many hours in my editor of choice, GrafX2, and I get the opportunity to see places where my workflow falls short. Sometimes, I want to do something but it's a little annoying because of the tools I use.

If I were nothing but an artist, then that would be the end. I'd either have to grit my teeth or move to another program. However, I'm a programmer and GrafX2 has a scripting API. I think you can see where I'm going with this.

Minor Troubles

There exists a pretty major roadblock for anyone who wants to get into GrafX2 scripting: There's no API documentation (As far as I can tell, at any rate). I spent my first 15 minutes or so trying to use the example scripts as reference, before getting fed up and tracking down the source code. As you can see here, there's one convenient spot in the codebase where you can find the relevant Lua functions. Thanks to my line of work, I'm already very used to reading code in place of docs so this made my work much simpler once I discovered it.

Another thing to be aware of is that GrafX2 always loads scripts when they're called. That means that all you need is an open copy of GrafX2, and you can regularly call your script for testing/debugging as you work. In my case, I set up my code and my editor side-by-side like so:

Click the image for a larger view

With these tools in hand, writing new scripts to improve my workflow is quite easy!

The Scripts

In the spirit of giving, I'm going to discuss the scripts that I've written and share them with the internet at large. All 3 or so GrafX2 users in existence can enjoy my work and rejoice!

If you just want the scripts and don't care about my chattering, click here now.

Animation to Spritesheet

This was my first and arguably most important script. GrafX2 generally exports animations as gifs which I have to go back and edit in GIMP to make them into spritesheets. This process is rather annoying, so I decided to make a script to do it automatically. Once that was done, I figured it might be worth my while to polish and release some scripts. (Technically, I still have to change the color mode to RGB in GIMP, but I plan to add indexed color support to dfgame sooner or later)

This script pretty just copies animation frames to the second page, and arranges them however the user asks. There are probably more options that I could add for more complex layouts, but it should cover most cases.

I recently noticed an issue with this script where it doesn't work occasionally. When that happens, you can probably just run it again and it'll work. The script's logic appears to be correct, so it may just be a GrafX2 bug. It's hard to tell for certain.

Zoom-in-Place

Zoom-in-Place, or ZinP as I like to call it, is a product of how I like to present my work. As you can see in this post, I like to place a zoomed version of my art next to the original. This is also useful for getting critique! Unfortunately, this is a little bit annoying to do manually. I could just take a screenshot, but that method is impossible for animations like this one:

That took about 2-3 seconds to produce, and most of those seconds were spent finding and starting up the script. It's probably even faster than spinning up a gif/video recorder, and unlike a recording this preserves the palette information correctly.

Append Page

Since I was on a roll, I decided to write another script. This 3rd script, Append Page, is pretty simple: It just copies information from the inactive page to the currently active one. Unlike the page copy in GrafX2, this script appends the copied data instead of replacing the original contents. The result leaves the two pages side-by side for easy comparison. Unlike a normal copy and paste, Append Page preserves layer information. As a result, you can easily compare two variations of the same image layer-by-layer without making several manual copies.

Conclusion

I'm aware that these scripts are fairly situational. Indeed, they're absolutely catered to my specific workflow. Honestly though, I think that brings up a really good argument for non-coders to learn just a little bit of scripting:

When you know the basics of scripting, you can take your tools and make them work just right. Maybe there's one little thing that annoys you here and there, or a minor little convenience feature you wish existed. When you know how to script, and your applications support doing so, there's nothing to stop you from solving your own problems and getting that perfect workflow.

Someday, I want to see a world where DIY scripting is regarded as normal enough for everyone to know just a little bit. It's awfully idealistic of me, but I think it'd be a nice thing to see. Programming can be awfully hard work, but just a little bit here and there can produce great results for relatively little trouble.

Singularity v0.3 relesed!

Can you believe that it's been 3 years since the last Singularity update? That's crazy! Never fret, I have a new one right here. It ended up landing a week late, but I don't really mind.

Honestly, I don't have much to say about the release itself that I haven't mentioned in a previous blog post. It's funny to see how far I've come since the first release, though. In the original version, you had to wait 10-15 minutes before it would actually open the window. In 0.2, the window would open but you pretty much couldn't do anything until it finished loading anyway. Now, it opens instantly and you can just start reading. Y'know, like any normal application.

I think that's the really funny thing about the progress I've made over the years. I've finally gotten to the point where I can make something "acceptable", something that looks like a run-of-the-mill product. Up until now, my work had more of this... hacked-together student project quality to it. Now, it feels more professional.

I think there are two main factors to this. One is obviously skill, you get better at things with practice. However, I think changing standards have made the more visible impact. For a long time, I developed things with only me in mind. I would embrace bugs and weirdness because the results were close enough to what I needed. Recently though, I've begun to think more in terms of "What would someone else think if they saw this?" As a result, I've been putting more effort into polishing my work.

For a good example of this in action, look at the commits I made between merging my code and making this release. What happened is that I decided to take some screenshots of the program, but realized that there were tons of little inconsistencies and problems that would ruin the shot. This led me to start tweaking and fixing, until everything felt like it met a certain level of quality. In doing so, I realized that several of my earlier additions had been left half-finished, like bits of the column view UI and the popover for new subscriptions. I fixed them up, but I'll have to be more careful about this in the future.

Looking good.

So that's a Singularity update out of the way. I'm still working on my game, slowly but surely. I was planning to release it this weekend, but it's still pretty rough. Since I no longer have a schedule to keep to, I'm in no real hurry to push this game out the door. I'd rather have one good, polished game that took too long than several bad games that I rushed.

2017 End of Year Wrap-up

I wrote this a couple days before New Year's Eve, but forgot to schedule it. Whoops!
 
Another year has come and gone, and even with health problems and tutorial troubles I still managed to complete a few projects.

This year also featured several new things, like my DFGame update videos and a semi-stable schedule. Without further ado, let's look back at the year's bounty:

DFGame

This is the 3rd year in a row that I've brought up DFGame in my end of year wrap-up.
In 2015, I decided to drop the DFEngine project in favor of something smaller and sleeker.
In 2016, I talked about how DFGame was pretty successful (and the rewrite I was planning).
And now, this year, I had an actual first release. It's nice to see a plan come together like that. There will be a new DFGame update coming out in 2018, with a few changes and fixes related to this post. I've updated the application module to provide split editor/game functionality, and stripped out all direct references to GLFW from the demos for good measure.

I've also been making a small game this week. I'll have more to share on that front soon.

Singularity

As a welcome surprise to cap off the year, the latest version of Singularity is pretty much done. All that I want to get done at this point is a little bit of extra documentation, and then I'll make the release official!

The Website

I redesigned several pages this year, and it's almost all finished. I'm not particularly fond of the tutorials page right now, both because it's not great looking and because it's lacking in content. However, the landing page, about me page, and software page got some nice makeovers.

The Ill-Fated Roguelike Tutorial

This whole project was really unfortunate. I think I made the right call by ultimately cancelling it, but I'll have to make up for the lost content with some smaller tutorials at some point.

Art!

Learning pixel art wasn't a very high priority on my to-do list, but my shoulder issues forced me to find a new hobby. Things have gone pretty well so far, and hopefully I can start reaping the rewards of my practice once I start back up on game development. In the meantime, have a few more pieces:

Next Year

With my retrospective done, it's time to give some consideration to the year ahead. Obviously my plans are subject to change, but I do have a general idea of what I want to do next.

Judging by my overall performance in 2017, I think I can feasibly complete somewhere in the ballpark of 1-2 reasonably-scoped projects in a year. I definitely want to revisit Halberd, although it'll probably take more than a year to complete. Alongside that, I want to make a couple tutorials (probably small ones) and some kind of game. I haven't really worked out any specifics for those, but they're on my to-do list.

For now, though, look forward to a singularity update and a minigame coming soon!