Steve Sullivan here. I'm one of the guys who helped design Slumberland, the house that ships with Casady & Greene's game Glider PRO.
One of the greatest things about Glider PRO is that you can design your own houses. This allows you to devise a puzzle of your own making for other Glider PRO players to solve. This capability is not new to Glider PRO, however; you could do this with Glider 4.0. What's neat about Glider PRO's implementation of the Room Editor is that you can add custom backgrounds to the rooms in your house, and this adds a whole new dimension to the game. You can now design a Glider PRO house and put your picture on the wall of one of the rooms. You can place any pictures you want into your house.
First, Here's how you do it:
1. Your custom background needs to be 512 pixels across and 322 pixels down.
2. It needs to be in the Macintosh's "System" color palette, in 256 colors.
3. it needs to be stored as a PICT resource with an ID of between 3000 and 3999.
4. It needs to be pasted into your house file with ResEdit and selected in the Room Editor's "House Info" screen as "Original Artwork."
All of this is covered in Glider PRO's manual as well.
That's the easy part. The hard part is to add custom backgrounds and have them look good, have them fit right in with all the rest of the room backgrounds in Glider PRO, and have them take up as little space as possible in the house file.
That's where The Glider PRO Construction Set (GPCS) comes in. Glider PRO Construction Set is a collection of 9 PICT files that are essentially blank Glider PRO rooms to which you can add your custom pictures. They are PICTs of the Asian Room, Bathroom, Basement, Kid's Room, Library, Paneled Room, Simple Room, Swinger's Room, and Unfinished Room. That's all well and good, but what does this have to do with saving file size?
If you've ever added custom PICTs to a Glider PRO house file, you've seen how much a custom PICT can add to the size of the file. If you went through the trouble of adding 20 different PICTs to your Glider PRO house, wouldn't you want as many people as possible to download and play the house file? Of course you would. But, if you're like me, you may like the description of the house as it is posted on AOL, and go to download it, only to find that the file (compressed even) would take over and hour to download! How many of us would stop right there and remove the file from the list of files to be downloaded? I know I would. As I write this, there are less than 15 custom houses uploaded to AOL, but that number is sure to grow as we enter the holiday season and more people buy Glider PRO.
The Glider PRO Construction Set PICT files have additional info in them that will allow you to place as many cutom pictures as possible in a single room background without adding any more overhead to the house file than is needed. Here's how that works:
A Glider PRO room background is 512 by 322 pixels and is broken up into 8 panels. This allows you to put on the background of the room (for instance) several wall outlets in the "unfinished room" background. When you look at a room in the "Room Info" view, you see on the left the room background "master," and on the right the actual room background layout as you have designed it. You can drag from left to right any room panels you want to make the room appear as you would like. (This is all before adding other objects, like clocks, furniture, or clutter). This how you add those small clouds right where you want them in the "sky" background, for instance.
The PICTs in Glider PRO Construction Set have marked off on them (with little back lines in the dormer at the top of the room) the boundaries between these 8 panels. (at 64, 128, 192, 256, 320, 384, and 448 pixels across, respectively). This allows you to add a picture to the wall of the room and make sure that it will only take up one, two, or three panels (or as many as you want). By pasting your custom picture into the Glider PRO Construction Set PICT and then making it line up within as few of these marks as you can, you will ensure that as little wall space is used as possible. Then you can add another picture to the wall and make sure it only takes up two panels (or whatever). Now you've got a custom background that will provide two different custom rooms in your house, and you only added ONE custom PICT to the house file. If you stick with really thin pictures (less than 64 pixels wide), you can have 5 or 6 custom rooms from only one custom background. Simply select the same resourse ID when designing the next room!
It's a good idea to keep at least one panel free of custom artwork so that you can drag over a blank panel to erase sections of the room that need to have nothing on them. I used this technique in my Glider PRO house, The Asylum, and I have (I think) 10 rooms with custom artwork and I only added two background files to the house, so it was only 208K before compression.
Using the Glider PRO Construction Set to add custom artwork to your house files will also make custom rooms look more consistent with the rest of the art in the game, as they are the same backgrounds as you see in 9 of the other possible room types.
The nine art files are PICTs in TeachText format. Any program capable of opening PICT files will be able to edit them. You will need to then save them as PICT resource files (with an ID of between 3000 and 3999) and then use ResEdit to copy and paste them into your house file. Adobe Photoshop is one program able to save a file as a PICT resource.
the Glider PRO Construction Set is e-mailware. If you use and are pleased with the Glider PRO Construction Set, send me e-mail at one of the addresses below. Even if you are not pleased with the set, send me e-mail at one of the addresses below.
Good luck making your custom artwork work in Glider PRO!
If you have questions or comments, send them to:
acmesteve@aol.com
or
sullivan@applelink.apple.com
-Steve Sullivan
K-12 Systems Egineer
Apple Computer, Inc.
Casady & Greene make no warranty about the fitness or appropiateness of this software for any use whatsoever, as they had nothing to do with its creation. I simply took screen shots of empty rooms, added the little panel marks and then asked john calhoun, Glider PRO's author, if it was cool for me to upload these files. Neither john calhoun nor I make any warranties either.
