AN EDITART FAQ.


by S.B.H.
(Shawn Henderson)
Special Thanks to the following contributors:
 - Jeff Howell



Now, first I'll go through a typical use of Editart, then go on to some of it's more complicated
(and sometimes pointless and buggy) uses.


I'm not responsible for any bad things that happen in using this Faq, so no complaints.
Editart is made by Kennith Silverman, and is copyrighted.



1.  Starting Editart

Go to your DOS Prompt, or to it through Windows (it doesn't seem to be any worse through Win
than DOS). 

Type "Editart",  a few lines of legal crap comes up, press enter to continue.  It should say
"Opening TILES000.ART", if nothing except some text appears on your screen after that, you
haven't extracted the ART files from DUKE3D.GRP.

To do this, type "Kextract Duke3d.GRP *.art"  
Kextract should be in "Goodies" of the CD.


2.  Picking a tile

To chose a tile, you can press Page Up, or Page Down to cycle through them one by one.  OR
Press "G" to Goto a tile number.  Or press "V" to go to a menu much like the one of Build.  Once
you have chosen a tile from the list, press enter.

Note:  When picking a tile via "V" the boundaries of the tile sets will slow things down, so if you
know the general area the tile you want is in, use the "G" first. 

Another Note:  When you use Goto (G) you do it while a tile is on screen, not like in build with a
bunch of tiles on screen.

3. First project (making a red dot)

To make a red dot, for any build project, first start up Editart.
Then goto the tile you want to change/create.  Press "S" to set the size in pixels.  Move to the
centre of the ART by pressing "O".  Chose the colour by pressing Shift and the Cursor keys. 
Then press Space-Bar to colour the point.

To give it a name press "N" then type "dot" and press enter.  To save the tile press "V" and "Y"
to save tile.

Now, if you went into Build, and chose the tile as a sprite, all the pink would become transparent
and only the dot would be there.

4.  Loading other pictures.

Now, you can press "U" to chose a picture to load, but most of the time if you chose one it
becomes all screwed up.  To make a picture to load, first edit it in a Paint program.  I use many
different ones like Neopaint, Paint Shop Pro and Adobe Photoshop.  When I'm done I resize it to
320*200, the best size to use.  Then I convert it to a Gif (a normal non-interlaced 87 Gif).  Gif's
seem to be the only file format that works properly, although it will accept Gif's, BMP's and a
few others.

The picture must be reduced to 256 colours too.


5.  Making transparents.

To make an uploaded pictures extra space transparent, use this process.

If the area wanted to be transparent is all one colour, and doesn't occur in any other part of the
drawing:

Chose the Transparent Colour by pressing Backspace or Shift-Cursor Keys.
Go to the area and press "C"
It should replace all the pixels of that colour you're on to the chosen colour.

If not all uniform:

Go to the Transparent Colour via Shift-CK or Backspace.
Move mouse to outside the picture to cut.
Press "T" then slowly cut out the picture.
Press "T" to shut Trail off then go the outside and press "F" to fill the outside.


6.  Drawing

To draw, select the colour.  
To draw a line press "T" for Trail, then press the cursor keys.  

Bug:  If you use the mouse, the first point will appear anywhere but on the mouse cursor
position. Here's the patter.  Whatever direction the mouse was moving before you stopped, it will
but a point behind it.

* - Pixel that has been coloured
+ - cursor

Was moving down:

*
+

Moving up:

*
+

Moving left:

*+

Moving right:

+*


Get it.  It's a bad thing for it to do, so I usually just set trail on an use the cursor keys, or use
Space-bar with the mouse, for 1 point directly under the mouse cursor position.

If you move directly up to the top, or bottom, or left or right, then it won't draw anything.


7.  To make Animations

Put the tiles to be animated right next to each other.  The first one in a tile like 3000, the next
one in tile 3001 ect.

Then press the "-" to select the animation style. NoAnm means no animation (normal), OCIL is
ocellation, it goes forward then back.  AnmFD is animation forward, then straight to the back at
then end and start again.  AnmBK is like AnmFD bust backward.

TO CONTROL ANIMATION SPEED:  Press "A" on the first tile, it will show you 
speed on the screen, press "-" to slow and "+" to quicken.

When the style is chosen press "+" to chose number.  Use this formula:  
Number=Number-of-tiles-in-the-sequence - 1

8.  Make your own Paralaxable skies.

Make a tile 128*400 in size, importing one doesn't seem to work so it will have to be a drawn
one.  You have to make 5 of these. then it will parallax using all 5.

9.  To make a tile able to lay flat.

To make a tile lay flat without screwing up, make the size a multiple of 32. like 64*32 or
something.

10. Commands



Cursor keys:  (  ->,  <-,  ^ , |  )   
                                      |    V
 Move the cursor around the screen.


Shift-Cursor Keys: Shift  + CK.  
Change Current colour.

"G"
goto tile

":" 
Emboss

" ' "
Emboss in other direction

"A"
If used on first tile of animation, controls speed.

"N"
set the name of the tile.

"U"
import a tile.

F12 or "B"
screen capture

"R"
set offset, 
ex.  Press "R" then "<-" (cursor key) and it will move all the pixels on the right side to the left,
useful to see if the tile will repeat nicely.

"J" or "C" 
change every pixel the cursor is on the current colour.

"]" or "O"
centre cursor.

"P"
restore tile, if you haven't pressed "M" at least once then the tile will fill with weird colour
designs.

"["
Soften or Blend tile.

"S"
set canvas size.

"F"
Flood fill, if Trail is on then it will not work.  May have to try turning the Trail off a few times.

"M"
Puts tile in memory, like a manual Undo.  Press "P" to restore.

">"
Darken tile from upper-left corners to cursor.
To set the top-left point go to it and press 1.

"<"
Lighten tile from upper-left corners to cursor.
To set the top-left point go to it and press 1.

Shift + "<" or ">"
Makes really weird colour designs.

Backspace
Move the Colour cursor to the Transparent colour directly (useful)

Tab
Move the colour cursor to the colour the cursor is currently on.

Space-Bar
Draws a point of colour directly under the mouse cursor.

"~"
Moves the tile to another place on the screen, doesn't really do much.




11.  Cutting and pasting.

Press "1" to start the cutting process, it acts like the top-left point of a dotted-cut-line box.
Press "2" to end the cutting process, it acts like the bottom-right point of the box.
Press "3" to paste it, the top-left point of the paste being where the cursor position is.
Press "4" to flip the cut piece of tile (not seen) in memory x-wise.
Press "5" to flip the cut piece of tile in memory y-wise,
Press "6" to swap the "x" and "Y" 's of the piece of tile.
Press "8" to paste the tile like in "3" but a bit transparent
Press "/" to halve the region.
Press "*" to double the region.



12. Bugs.

Other than the mouse drawing problem, and the slowdown during tile selection, I haven't found
any.
One thing though.  Editart doesn't recognise imported pictures as having colours.  Ex.  If you
have an imported picture that is a white box with a green line in the middle, you can't try to fill
one side of the box hoping the fill with end at the line.  It only recognises lines it makes as being
boundaries.  So use Trail on a lot.  And "M" - "P" because there's lots of room to make lots of
mistakes.

13.  The art file.

The art file you make new art it should be in TILES014.ART after the tile "USER ART" near the
bottom, when you get to the end it should start making a TILE015.ART and so on.


14. Some potential bugs when starting EDITART

If it displays a blank screen after showing the legal stuff, you may not have copied all the 
DAT files over into your duke3d directory.

Also, if you have been having some difficulty with Build, flickering, and EDITART will not
run, then I could be your mouse, try different mouse drivers.

14.  Information about auto-import transparencies.

Since it would be faster and easier just to cut and paste the information, here it is:



"The transparent colour is ALWAYS colour 255 in the palette. It does  not matter what the RGB
shade actually is. For reasons which are not  clear to me (forgive the pun) both Corelpaint and
Photomagic convert  it to magenta when the PCX is imported. One must use a selective  erase
(Corel) to convert the magenta to colour 255 before saving it  as GIF or PCX. I find GIF is more
reliable for odd size art. The  imported pic will turn magenta when it is loaded back. The 
experience with 'bright white' was because this is the default for  255 in some paint software."

-- Jeff Howell



That's it so far, any new info can be sent to me at chend@ora.auracom.com

Thanx

S.B.H.
