Christopher Bazley <christopher.baz...@blueyonder.co.uk>

Hello,

Just a minor announcement that I have released updated versions of my
suite of Star Fighter 3000 game editor utilities.

'FednetCmp' handles files compressed with an algorithm used in old
Fourth Dimension and Fednet games such as 'Chocks Away', 'Stunt Racer
2000' and 'Star Fighter 3000'. Game files may be decompressed and
compressed, singly or in batches, using a simple desktop interface.

'SFcolours' is an editor for 'Star Fighter 3000' colours files, which
define the palette of colours to be used when rendering hills and
other polygonal objects in the game.

'SFSkyEdit' is an editor for 'Star Fighter 3000' sky colours files,
which specify the colours to be used to render a particular type of
planetary atmosphere (e.g. sunset, morning, night, gas clouds etc).

'SFToSpr' is a graphics file format converter which converts between
the bitmap graphics formats used by the game 'Star Fighter 3000' and
the ubiquitous RISC OS Sprite file format.

The main reason for this new release is that the previous versions of
'SFSkyEdit' and 'SFColours' suffered from code bloat due to a silly
error which crept into a commonly-used macro defined by a CBLibrary
header file (see http://starfighter.acornarcade.com/mysite/programming
.htm#cblibrary ). Also, the previous version of 'SFtoSpr' had an
undocumented dependency upon a version of the shared C library which
supports APCS-32 being resident.

The main user-facing change is the addition of an option button in the
save dialogue box for 'SFColours' and 'SFSkyEdit', to allow the user
to save only the selected colours. I have also added alternative
keyboard shortcuts for 'SFSkyEdit' that utilise the function keys
instead of Ctrl-letter combinations (the old shortcuts are still
recognised, but deprecated).

To see screenshots and further information, or to download these
applications, please see http://starfighter.acornarcade.com/utils.htm

--
Chris Bazley
My corner of the web: http://www.bigfoot.com/~chrisbazley/
Star Fighter 3000: http://starfighter.acornarcade.com/