17 Bit Software 2: Collection B

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Table of contents A. Introduction B. Setup C. Drawing D. Using menus E. Requirements F. Next generation A. Introduction Welcome in the world of UPRIGHT!. This is the first of many to come public release. Huge v1.0 is a powerful tool, in the right hands that is. I started developping Huge as a source utility, releiving me of the pain of designing and using gadgets and other imagery in my programs. Such a program should allow the use of the various display modes that Amiga has, and let the user choose the number of colors and the colors themselves. This way, the user is free to choose what screen his program is going to open in, and design his gadgets knowing from the beginning how the will look like. The main goal now is making gadgets look great, making life beautiful that is. In the first stages, months ago, the program could only draw something and save it in ASCII, in a format that could be inserted in a C source program and compiled properly. Then I realised that it was dead easy once I had the kernel, to be able to handle any other type of imagery Amiga users encounter: icons, sprites, brushes. Huge is able to load any kind of these, alter it and save it back, in the same or other format. Images and sprites are in fact C source data, the rest are standard Amiga formats. Huge is able to differenciate between PAL & NTSC Amigas. It takes advan- tage of PAL's excess number of display lines to create greater images, so Europeans will have higher imagery than the Americans. B. Setup When the user starts Huge, either from Workbench or CLI, two screens open, one for the gadgets and menus, the other for drawing. The gadget screen is seperate, so the imagery can survive any user confi- guration of colors and resolution. There are two groups of gadgets, those for various operations, and those for the drawing tool used. Four menus complete the display. The drawing screen consists of some color selection gadgets, the zoom window and the actual image window. If Huge cannot find a preferences file, it defaults editing an image, in a HIRES non-interlaced screen with 8 default colors. The type of object being edited has nothing to do with the actual drawing, it only affects the methods of input and output to disks. The primary selections the user should make, are screen mode, palette, and object type. These preferences can be saved, so that they don't have to be changed every time the program is run. C. Drawing Once screen mode and colors are selected, we are ready to begin. Various drawing tools are available: points, lines, boxes, circles, ellipses and connected lines. Just select the gadget and you got the corresponding tool. Coordinates for drawing can be input either from the zoom window or the image window. Only for points zoom is updated immediately, in the other cases zoom is updated after the sequence is over. Still coordinates can be input in zoom window, only the drawing is temporarily invisible. All tools behave as in every drawing program. Note that circle radious is decided only by the vertical distance from the center. Right mouse button is used to indicate end of a line in the connected lines tool. The color used can be altered by hitting a color gadget. The deeper the screen, the more colors you get. For screens with few colors, a primitive dithering technique can be used (in fact checkered). Selecting background color from the special menu, and setting pattern active gives this ability. This mixed color is used in every line, point or fill operation, until another color combination is selected, or the pattern mode is made inactive. A little bug here, circles and ellipses don't comply to pattern, they just use foreground color instead. Well, that's Amiga's bug, note Huge's. The zoom window initially magnifies the upper left corner of the image. Selecting the magnify operation gadget, enables you to alter the spot which is currently magnified. A small box appears in the image window, whose size reflects the magnify ratio. Use the pointer to alter it's position and click the left mouse button. The new position is now established. Again, coordinates can be input either in zoom or in image window. Huge has got text editors' capabilities of cutting and pasting. Use cut operation gadget to define a rectangla area: first select the upper left position and then the cut size. Selection is done in the same way as for zoom window. This rectangle is copied to the clip buffer, and can be after- wards pasted any number of times, until something new is cut. You can paste this in the same image, or in the image behind it. Well, now you heard a new thing, 'the image behind the image'. The lower right operation gadget rese- mbles the front-back gadget of an intuition window, but in this program is used to bring up the 'other image'. In this way they don't have to be simultaneously present, increasing the available space for drawing. The second image is necessary for icons with alternate image, or simply as a backup area for comparisons, or whatever you like. So the clipped rectangle can be pasted to either one of the images, even to an image loaded later, provided that screen mode hasn't been changed. There are various paste modes, activated from the special menu item 'Paste mode'. Jam #2 completely overwrites the paste over the image, and inverse video does the same, inverting the paste colors. Jam #1, and Complement are nasty; the certain thing is that the background (color 0) of the paste, will not harm the image, but the rest colors are difficult to predict. In general, they will be different than any of the paste's or image's, but anyway some good results can be achieved. The fill operation gadget, flood fills the image with whatever color or pattern is selected. You are asked to input a point, the center of the flood fill. Again you select the point by clicking where you want. The zoom window is particularly useful for small areas. The palette operation gadget is pretty obvious, and tha strange looking next to it is to bring Workbench in front for whatever you like it to. In the second row of operation gadgets there are two mirrors, left-right and up-down and two rotators, anti-clockwise and clockwise. Every operation expects a rectangle area to be input first, like in cutting, and then acts on it. The rotated version will have common the upper left corner with the original. Note that when there is difference between vertical and horizontal screen resolution, the rotated version will be a bit stretched. Best results are achieved in full-HIRES mode or in full-LORES, when resolutions are same. Finally the undo gadget does that. There is no possibility of un-undo, once you undo you can't get back to what you had. D. Using menus Till this point you have heard many things about menus, now the rest will be explained. Let's start from the beginning. a. Project menu Here object is selected, as well as input and output to drives. When some objects (ie. icons and sprites) are selected, the screen mode may have to change. That is because icons are to be seen in Workbench screen (HIRES, non interlaced) and sprites are always displayed in full LORES. Thus if screen mode is different than these, there won't be any relation between what you see when you draw and what you see when you use it. The rest objects put no restictions in screen mode. The brush object is mainly included to load brushes, designed by a heavy paint program and use it as an icon or image. Still brushes can be saved, but I don't think there will be users making brushes out of this program. Finally the bob object is tricky; you cannot select it, because it doesn't exsist as far as Huge is concerned. I couldn't make out the Bob (used by AmigaBASIC) format, it is only there for the second version of this editor. The object selected decides the method of loading and saving. Whatever object is selected, that format is expected by the loader, who will com- plaint otherways, and the saver. Now we come to the main attraction of this program, the OS input-output routines. I dare to say that they are simply a masterpiece, and by far the most difficult task I had to complete in this program. Huge maintains and updates internally, lists of every device, assigned directory and volume of the Amiga. It can tell if a volume is mounted or write protected, or if a drive is empty. I assure you that unless you do something extremely stange, you will never see an OS requester, and this is all for the better because they are very ugly. Instead a fine scrolling message will inform you of what is going on. The loader permits you to enter input while reading. It functions as every other loader you have seen on Amiga, but it is the prettiest of all. Thanks to newtec for the idea, but guys I went a lot further. The directory that input and output takes place, is initially that which contains Huge, in the progress can be altered by loader or saver, or even evaporate. So if sometime you enter a name in 'save as ' and the screen flashes, provide a full path instead, for the program has no directory. In order to save something first you have to enter a valid filename, and if all is OK, select in the usual way the portion of the image to save. b. Preferences menu You can alter the screen mode with this menu. When you select the screen mode item, a requester appears, from which you can select resolution and number of colors. The number of colors is decided by the depth gadgets, get deeper for more colors. The formula is colors = 2 ^ depth that is an increase in depth by one, doubles the colors available. The 'WB mode' option gives you a standard workbench for editing icons, or whatever you like to open in the workbench screen. When you are through selecting click OK gadget, or CANCEL to exit. Almost every selection has these two gadgets, OK in the top left corner and CANCEL next to it. The drawing screen is completely reset, so you had better save all you have drawn before. If you forget, Huge will tell you. If the current object that is edited is icon or sprite, the screen mode cannot be changed, for the reasons I explained, so if you want WB mode, first select it by setting an object (temporarily) that permits screen changes, and then change object to icon. Next are some items for opening and closing Workbench screen when possible for memory conservation purposes. Images and sprites (C source) are saved without any palette information, so a programmer will need the palette registers as well as the image data. There is a save palette option for that, and a load palette, if you want another palette. Again the format can be understood by any C compiler. In the case of sprites, keep in mind that sprites use color registers 16 and further up, so the for colors saved must be entered in the proper registers. Also the fourth colour is transparent, no matter what you see in the editor. Save preferences can be used to save the current preferences, and use them as default the next time. Preferences include object edited, screen resolution and depth, and finally palette. The preferences file is named 'huge.preferences' and must be in the same directory as the program. Note that if you choose 'Save preferences' and you have changed the initial directory by any means, the preferences file will be written there, and not in the initial directory. This call only checks if Huge has a directory not write protected and saves, else beeps. Whenever you see a beep, something went wrong. c. Icon menu This menu is active only when the object selected is icon. You can specify various icons characteristics as in any icon editor. Note that if Image is selected for highlighting, then the visible image is saved as primary icon and the hidden as secondary (selected) icon. d. Special menu Here there are various special effects. Background color, lets the user select the background color which is used for pattern line drawing and filling, when pattern mode is on. Once you se- lect this item nothing is done, but the next time you choose a color gadget this will be interpreted as the background color. If pattern mode is active, this will be used as the background of images and fills. Pattern active item is toggle select, you can turn it on and off. It's initial state is off. When it is on, drawing routines use a 0xaaaa pattern, if this means anything to you, or with other words one pixel is with fore- graound color, the other is with background color. When this mode is active you can select and change the foreground color, as in normal mode, but if you want to change the background color, you have to select the previous item. I have already explained the use of paste mode. The last item, grid color, is something like background color, ie. once you select it nothing happens and the next color you select doesn't become foreground color, but the grid lines are redrawn in this color. Normally Huge uses the last color for grid lines, but sometimes this color ruins the display. F. Requirements Huge, as any other program involving screens is memory hungry. If the program exits with no obvious reason, there was a memory allocation error while trying to find screen memory. Closing Workbench is a good idea, or switching off any external drives. For the icon stuff to work, icon.library must be in the current libs: directory, otherways Huge won't run. Finally I observed that when FastFonts is installed, the scrolling mes- sages get jerky. If you get jerky scrollings, check your startup-sequence for FF. If this is the case, run FF -n from CLI and the scroll will be fine. I didn't check the scroll with the old agnus chip (I have an A2000 with FAT agnus), so if anybody with old agnus gets any jerky scrolls, let me know. F. Next generation This program is great, but it can get better. Possible improvements I have in mind are ability of entering text, improved palette (copy colors, make shades), and yet more objects, like some format AMOS can understand. I know AMOS has a sprite editor, but it is comparatively small, and how can one design a Huge end of level guardian?. Finally some modes for assembly lan- guage source files. The numbers themselves are the same as for C, but they need some format manipulation, so assemblers will understand them. Please let me know your opinions, bug reports, and praises. I don't ask for money, just the fame. I want to have people drinking in my name. Using Huge properly will improve the looks of the new programs to come, designing beautiful gadgets, as these in Huge. No wonder that they were made with the program itself. Make life beautiful. UPRIGHT! 5 Gregoriou E St., GR 54 248 THESSALONIKI GREECE Tuesday 27 November 1990