New version of Star Fighter 3000 editing utilities - comp.sys.acorn.games

Message from discussion New version of Star Fighter 3000 editing utilities
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Subject: New version of Star Fighter 3000 editing utilities
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn.games
From: Christopher Bazley <christopher.baz...@blueyonder.co.uk>
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Date: Thu, 25 Jun 2009 14:23:27 +0100

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/