The VG Resource

Background Remover Update!

Background Remover 1.2

I've added a little "Auto-crop" check box to Background Remover, which lets you choose whether you actually want it to crop the images after you've removed the background, or let them keep their original image dimensions (any space that would've been cropped will just be pure transparent). I did this because I needed it myself, and I bet others would too (especially if you want to animate the results).

I've also gone ahead and compiled it with the .air installer this time too. That is, you can now install it on any OS that supports AIR. It should update any previous versions as usual, though.
As expected, I didn't get any feedback from Super Laser Map Organiser (since it's rarely useful), so I would love to hear from anyone who uses Background Remover on an OS other than Windows, to confirm whether it works or not, and if there are any compatibility problems.

EDIT: Just updated this version to support BMP files, after realising that the files I wanted to use it on were BMPs. I should have done it anyway though, since BMPs always have some sort of background and this is an easy way to remove them.
What's cool (from my point of view, anyway) is that you can load both PNGs and BMPs at once, just as if they're one and the same file format, and it'll treat them as such.

Whoa! Epic! Nice job! These do look pretty nifty, I'll have to try these out soon.

BastionPkgExtract is here!

This is a program I made to extract files from .pkg files used in Bastion, which contain images, and instructions about how they should be animated. There already is a program that does this, PkgUtil, but 1) you had to compile it yourself, and 2) it was a command-line program. My program is based off of PkgUtil though (I translated the decompression code from C# to AS3), so alisci01 has credit for that.
Anyway, BastionPkgExtract will extract .xnb images and any corresponding .atls files from .pkg files. .xnb is a format used by Bastion (and other games made in C#), and can be converted to .png using TheShyGuy's program, XnbToPng. The .atls files are a format I made myself (huehue Cool

), as opposed to the .xml files that PkgUtil creates. The reason I did this is because I'm personally more comfortable with writing and reading byte-level data than .xmls in AS3. While I admit that .xml files are easier for humans to read, there's no real need to read or edit them anyway. Plus, it was fun to make my own file format. If anybody wants to know how to read them, here's a .doc containing the format specification.

This is the first of two programs I'm making to help myself (and others, if they want) to rip sprites from Bastion. The other program, which I'm currently underway with, will take .pngs (converted from the .xnbs) and their corresponding .atls files, and organise the sheets so that they can be uploaded to tSR. I made a sort of alpha version a while ago that used PkgUtil's .xml files, and used that to make the sheets you can find on the site here.

TL;DR: It's a program that does stuff with Bastion files. If you don't care about that then you don't need it Tongue

You can download it here, and on the first post (along with info/instruction and a screenshot).

New program, BFTMTool!

This is a fairly basic command-line application that can extract BFTM files, as well as create them. BFTM is an archive file format, used to package most of the assets in Blocks That Matter. I made a format specification doc if anybody's interested. I'd like to thank Ploaj for translating some Russian information I found on the format, it was a big help.

If you click on the app (i.e. run it with no parameters) you'll get the usage instructions:

Code:
Usage: BFTMTool [-c] [-p] bftm [dir]

Options:

    -c: Create bftm. If omitted it will extract

    -p: Prevent files from being overwritten (unused when creating)

    bftm: The bftm file to create/extract from

    dir: When creating this is the directory that will be the root of the created bftm, and it is required. When extracting this is the directory where the bftm will be extracted to, and if it is omitted it will be set to a subfolder of where the bftm is located.

Elaboration of usage

By the way, I noticed that creating a BFTM is slightly faster than extracting, while I expected it to be the other way round. I think I know why though. In any case it's pretty fast both ways.

Anyway, here's the download. I made this with Haxe, not AS3, so I could compile it to a native .exe and pack it in a .zip. It does use a couple of DLLs, but there's no installation required, just extract and run. Only downside is that it's Windows-only, but I don't think that matters much in this case.
I intend to eventually port all of my applications over to Haxe so that at least Windows users won't have to go through installation, or downloading AIR.

So yeah. I don't think a lot of people will really need or want this, but there wasn't a tool for this yet, and it was a fun programming exercise. I personally used it to rip the sprites from Blocks That Matter (that was a while ago, I used a very unpolished version), and I'm sure somebody would be able to mod many aspects of the game using this, if they know what they're doing.

Even if I wouldn't have a use for them, there's something exciting about seeing you complete these kinds of programs.

puggsoy

jad4321

puggsoy

puggsoy

Garamonde