I’m almost done with Part IV of the Bratalarm Crackme tutorial series. I’ve been plugging away at it little by little but I’m still working on a few other projects as well.
I started sifting through code in old backups and dumping anything halfway useful or interesting to GitHub. I also started working on a sprite editor for Seven Kingdoms, one of my favorite games of all time. It was released as open source a few years back and I’ve been following the project closely for a bit. It’s definitely helped me brush up on my C++. I have a lot of fun altering the AI moreso than anything else, though I’ve helped out with a couple bugs too.
I’ve always hated just about anything to do with graphics and design and that was part of what drew me to working on the sprite editor. I realized it’s one (of the undoubtedly many) element of programming I’ve pretty much never dealt with. My first project with graphics was a mini Zelda clone proof-of-concept in QBASIC.
All that luscious imagery was hand-coded in QB with color values. A few years later, I’d started another game project, a Pokemon clone that I’d worked on with a friend. We were in college at the time and stayed too busy to keep working on it, especially after I left early for a job and he took on an engineering major.
That was done in .NET and with standard functions to load and use the images so it didn’t take much learning on graphics beyond a bit of animation and tiling.
Doing this sprite editor, however, required me to translate C to C# – and that C was translated from pure assembly a little while back. C to C# isn’t as easy as it seems, mostly because the syntax is so similar yet has enough differences to drive you mad when you accidentally code in C in the Visual Studio editor. Plus, some constructs in C are poorly replicated in C#, like Arrays. In C#, you should be using Lists or some other newer IEnumerable which are much more feature rich and easier to deal with.
I’m about a week into the project thus far and it’s going well. It took me several days to figure out the precise format of some of the SPR/sprite files and another day or two to figure how to deal with 8-bit-indexed bitmaps in C#; it is not set up to be terribly easy since no one uses that stuff anymore.
Anywho, now I can edit sprites. I can almost save them back to their native format too; it was a lot easier to implement saving 32-bit bitmaps. The custom-indexed bitmap is proving to be a bit more difficult but I’m almost there.
