Puggsoy's Bunch of Applications

[puggsoy]

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

Basically, you can extract a file by dragging it onto the program (i.e. run it with the file as its only parameter), it'll extract the contents to a subfolder named "extracted". You can specify a directory when running it with the command-line, and also pass "-p" as an option if you don't want it to overwrite existing files.

To create a file, you need to pass "-c" as an option. The BFTM you specify is the one that will be created, and you must specify a directory. All files and folders in this directory will be packed into the BFTM, preserving directory structure. This doesn't include the directory itself, it is what you would call the "root" of the BFTM.

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.