The source code for a new revision release of Wesnoth RCX is now available.
Version 0.1.2 (Gzip tarball, 60 KiB)
SHA1 checksum: 060e45725711a4f4dca284af1ceec2a144042fe4
The main changes in this version include adding support for dropping files into the application’s window or shortcut, and allowing to open more compatible file formats: Windows Bitmap (BMP), and depending on Qt4’s configuration, Photoshop PSD and GIMP XCF — note that output is still solely in the PNG format for simplicity and it’ll remain so.
I sort of promised support for dragging images from RCX, but that won’t be possible yet because it’s not as trivial as drop support and I’m too lazy at the moment. I also made a few minor revisions in the UI, but you probably don’t care about that or any of this until I can offer Windows and Mac OS X binaries — unfortunately, we’re not quite there yet because I need your help for that. It’s not magic. I can’t make it work without an adequate development environment for each platform and, as you should know at this point, I don’t own any Mac machines.
The instructions for using the source code don’t follow this time. I know what you think 🥱 , so it’s up to you to read the included INSTALL file in the distribution archive.
Feedback
Don’t hesitate to comment on RCX’s development, usability, bugs, or suggest new features! The only way things can get fixed or improved is that you make sure I am aware of what needs to be changed. If you think you can help with something else, please tell me!
UPDATE (2010-12-06): migrated files to SourceForge.net
Now working on drag-and-drop support for Wesnoth RCX. Dropping image files and actual image data already works with some simple and quickly crafted code thanks to Qt4’s power and simplicity. The next logical step is enabling RCX to drag the original and generated image data to other applications.
A new revision of codename “Morning Star” is available, this time with a preliminary production name — meet Wesnoth RCX 0.1.1.
Version 0.1.1 (Gzip tarball, 32 KiB)
SHA1 checksum: bdb9c31e6e43ca1bf985e1e4d390d96dbab19e1a
The main changes in this version include fixing the glitches with dragging the selection in the color ranges list view, making the window resizable again (this time the contents adjust to its size), and a few minor revisions here and there.
Compiling the sources
Since I’ve got no packagers to help at the moment, the only way to install for now is from source. Since I’ve been working only with Qt Creator so far, there’s no specific build recipe other than the project file (morningstar.pro), which you are expected to use to generate a Makefile using QMake.
To do this, just make sure you have Qt4’s development files and QMake installed (package qt4-qmake on Debian and Ubuntu), and type the command as follows:
$ qmake morningstar.pro
Note: If you have Qt3’s version of QMake installed, you may have to explicitly use qmake-qt4 instead to avoid confusing the generator and messing up the sources.
Once QMake generates the Makefile, just issue make and wait for compilation to finish. The binary morningstar will appear in the source dir, and you can now run it from there — no installation is required.
Git repository
There’s also a Git repository hosted at Gitorious.org, from which you can download the latest source code, follow the history, and switch releases according to tags.
Don’t hesitate to comment on RCX’s development, usability, bugs, or suggest new features! The only way things can get fixed or improved is that you make sure I am aware of what needs to be changed. If you think you can help with something else, please tell me!
UPDATE (2010-12-06): migrated files to SourceForge.net
UPDATE: the bugs in 0.1.0 were so annoying I uploaded a fixed version 0.1.0.1 shortly afterwards. Enjoy!
At last, the first working version of codename “Morning Star” is available — this is the new Qt4 GUI for team-colorization and palette switching for Wesnoth sprites.
After a day or so of working on it, distributed amongst 4 days, version 0.1.0 is now ready for downloading from this very site for testing purposes, although it should be usable for production from now on as well. Just don’t blame me if it eats your precious input.
Version 0.1.0.1 (Gzip tarball, 24 KiB)
SHA1 checksum: 132d326d265b61ae7441a599f7dc10537c13bc8e
In all seriousness though, I want this application to become usable by the general audience after reaching version 1.0. Artists are naturally the intended target audience, although users who just want to recolor Wesnoth sprites to use as their forum avatar may also find a use in this tool. 😉 However, to achieve this, I need your feedback. Please try Morning Star out, report bugs, suggest features (within the scope of the project’s goal), and if you think you can help with anything else, tell me!
Don’t forget that Morning Star is also in need of a definitive name!
Compiling the sources
Since I’ve got no packagers to help at the moment, the only way to install for now is from source. Since I’ve been working only with Qt Creator so far, there’s no specific build recipe other than the project file (morningstar.pro), which you are expected to use to generate a Makefile using QMake.
To do this, just make sure you have Qt4’s development files and QMake installed (package qt4-qmake on Debian and Ubuntu), and type the command as follows:
$ qmake morningstar.pro
Note: If you have Qt3’s version of QMake installed, you may have to explicitly use qmake-qt4 instead to avoid confusing the generator and messing up the sources.
Once QMake generates the Makefile, just issue make and wait for compilation to finish. The binary morningstar will appear in the source dir, and you can now run it from there — no installation is required.
Git repository
There’s also a Git repository hosted at Gitorious.org, from which you can download the latest source code, follow the history, and switch releases according to tags.
After a burst of inspiration, I managed to finish implementing Morning Star’s most basic functionality: recoloring images!
Thanks to Qt4’s awesome high-level interface to images (using QImage objects), the recoloring logic turned out to be much shorter and easier to understand than Wesnoth-TC’s, which had to deal with libpng and all the storage format details with PNG files. Instead, Morning Star just needs to care about reading, comparing and writing 32-bit ARGB values.
The interface design is pretty much set in stone now for version 1.0, but there’s still a lot of functionality missing. Nonetheless, this is starting to look good and I should have a working version for releasing to the public very soon. Hopefully this time artists will like this tool.
Thanks to the power of Qt4, my long-delayed sister project to Wesnoth-TC, codenamed “Morning Star”, is finally commencing to materialize.
While I’m progressing slowly on this as always, partly due to my parallel work on Rei 2 IRC bot, this project is very likely to get completed soon thanks to Qt Creator, an awesome IDE designed for the development of Qt4-based software applications — with a familiar feel akin to Microsoft Visual Studio, which was incidentally involved in my early learning process with C#.
Morning Star is not a front-end to Wesnoth-TC as I initially planned. Instead, it is a whole new application built upon the same logic which will be oriented to the general audience so that artists can take advantage of its preview features, and even export recolored images, all without the need to use a command prompt, which is the main limitation of Wesnoth-TC right now. 😉
I have not decided upon a name for Morning Star, so if anyone can propose an adequate formal name for this project, I’d appreciate suggestions.
