a GUI version of the msk2bmp tool made by temaperacl
This project ended up being a lot more ambitious than I originally planned, but it's turning out quite nicely.
A special "Thank You!" goes out to several people in the community who helped in the developement of this Image Editing tool: BakerStaunch DandyMcGee MonotoneZombie ...and a ton of other people who I will eventually list when I remember them all :P Thank you everyone!
Ok so here's how "Q's (version) Fallout Image Editor" works:
The program currently opens with a very simple "Load files..." button and the full default Fallout palette including the upper cycling colors.
Loading a compatible image (jpg, png, bmp) or Fallout FRM file will open a second window with a preview of this image. The red squares indicate how the image will be tiled if it's supposed to be an overworld map.
- Currently only a single frame of an FRM will be displayed, Plans are to expand this to display all frames, and to allow each frame to be edited individually.
- FRM's that use color cycling currently don't display correctly, Plans are to add color cycling to this image display too.
Once the image is loaded there are several buttons above the image with conversion and editing options.
- These buttons are currently fairly generic and mostly apply to non-FRM images,
- Plans are to make them context specific with dropdowns for the alternative color matching profiles (to include dithering options).
The "Preview Tiles" buttons are intended to be used to make Fallout's overworld map tiles from the image provided, by splitting it up into the correct sized tiles (according to the red squares overlapping the loaded image screen), and applying post processing algorithms (palettizing, color matching, and dithering). The tiled image opens in a new panel with the "Save as Map Tiles..." button at the top.
Clicking "Save as Map Tiles..." will export the individual tiles directly to the Fallout 2 install directory set in the "Default Fallout Path" configuration, under the "data/art/interface" folder, with the appropriately numbered name for the tile, . If the "Default Fallout Path" is not set yet, a warning will pop up asking the user to set it.
- This implementation is currently very simple, and will automatically overwrite any map tile images that may already be there. Plans are to add warning checks if files already exist, as well as directory checks (might crash if "data/art/interface" doesn't exist).
"Preview as Image" buttons will display the image in its entirety with the selected color matching and dithering options applied to it.
The "Save as Image..." button at the top will export the full image with all the post processing (palettizing/color matching/dithering) applied to it.
- Note Currently images are only saved as either BMP or FRM, and which one it saves as is set by the original image's extension. ie: FRM's can only be saved as BMP, and all other compatible image types can only be saved as FRM. Plans are to add a function that switches the export type based on the extension the user picks in the save file dialogue window. (And hopefully also matching the extension in the filename itself).
Finally, the "Convert and Paint" button will apply the post processing (palettizing/color matching/dithering) to the image and creates a layer to paint on. You can change the color of the paint tool by clicking on one of the predefined palette colors in the Fallout palette menu.
- Currently the only implemented paint tool is a single fill-rect tool with pre-defined values for the size Plans are to add some controls for the size of the tool, and hopefully other painting tools (specifically select and fill, gradient fill, eraser, and maybe some shape fill/masking fill).
- Building this paint tool will probably take the longest, and is only useful for single frame images right now, though I am interested in ideas to make editing multiple frame animations more convenient.
The "Create Mask Tiles" button will open an editing layer on top of the original image (with partial transparency) which can only be painted in black an white. This editing window is used to make a special MSK file for each corresponding map tile that you draw on. Mask tiles are used in the Fallout engine to block players from moving across some portion of the map. The only real examples of this in either game is the west coast: The ocean area is masked off using a mask tile, preventing the player from swimming to the Oil Rig in Fallout 2 (and not much else in Fallout).
- Currently this editing window can only be used to draw in single pixels, and the export functions don't work yet. Plans are to add a fill function and maybe some line drawing functions to provide borders for the fill operation.
The "Export Mask Tiles" button is currently unimplemented.
- Currently working on this one, hoping to have it available for the next beta release. Should work similar to the "Save as Map Tiles" button.
You can take a large image (currently about 300 tiles worth) and this tool
will crop the image into a set of tiles that can be laid out on the town
map.
Not only this but, if the Fallout 2 directory is set correctly and
the necessary sub-directories exist, this tool can also integrate new tiles
directly into the game and make them accessible in the mapper without having
to enable library mode and importing them one at a time.
On top of exporting new tiles for the town map, integrating them into the game (and thus the mapper), this tool will also create pattern files that the Fallout 2 mapper (mapper2.exe) can use to simply paint an entire image out in one stroke. Currently this works best on new (blank) maps because of how the mapper paints out tiles from pattern files and replaces surrounding tiles with blank tiles, but this is easily the fastest way to import entire building roof images such as the Gecko power plant, or the 2 and 3 story buildings in New Reno.
--Wide Character Support-- This release should have wide character support, but needs some testing. Please leave some feedback if you're running a foreign language operating system (OS).
--Multidirectional Animations in FRMs-- Animated FRM's will now play in all 6 directions based on user selections in the display menu.
You can't change offsets per image yet, but this is something I plan to implement in this tool eventually. Frame Animator 2 seems to handle this pretty well, and can be used to easily put an animation together if the scripting language is understood, but you can change the offsets for an individual image.
--Drag & Drop-- You can now drag and drop individual images onto the window and the editor will automatically open them. Eventually I'd like to implement this in such a way as to allow the user to drop a set of map tile FRMs, or a set of mask tile MSKs, onto the window and it will automatically organize them visually into the same arrangement they have in the game. This will probably include some sort of control to modify the total number of tiles the map is wide, similar to how the engine itself organizes the tiles using the "num_horizontal_tiles" setting in the WORLDMAP.TXT file in the data/data folder.
--Automatic Registering of Map Tiles and Map Mask Tiles-- The Fallout engine uses WORLDMAP.TXT to register the map tiles and mask tiles for the game to display. There is currently no implementation to handle this file in this editor, but I would like to add one at some point. Actually physically registering the tiles isn't difficult, and you don't have to if they're the same number as the original game, but it might be a neat feature and may cut down on some of the learning curve for modding.
Well, those are all the things I've got working so far, and a few things I'd like to get working in the future. Hope the modding community finds this useful, and any support (by that I mean financial) is always welcome! Thanks for taking the time to read this, I don't know yet how to do feedback here, so I'll just sign off with this:
It took me about a year to get this far, but I'm not done yet. Keep an eye out for more modding tools in the future...even if it does take a while to actually get them built :)
These packages are used in the build process:
GLAD
GLFW
SDL_image @ d3c6d59 ---- this is a git submodule, will have to "git submodule init", then "git submodule update"
imgui-docking
tinyfiledialogs
Might have to uninstall libtbb-dev if building with cmake
cmake -S . -B build
cd build
make
The msk2bmpGUI.sln file can be opened and compiled in Microsoft Visual Studio.
Disable/Uninstall the "C++ CMake tools for Windows" plugin.
SDL2 and SDL_image v2.6.3 will have to be installed separately for the time being, but I plan on replacing SDL with stb_image so this should change eventually. For now, you need the -dev package for each, they should have .dll and .lib files as well as a .h header file.
Then you'll have to manually add the include directories to MSVS, and the linker needs to point to the .lib files.
Finally, as part of the final compile step, the SDL2.dll and SDL_image.dll files will need to be copied to the compile destination folder.