AceToolkit

[Accensus]

AceToolkit is a collection of tools I've developed over time, mostly at the request of friends. The goal of those is to automate or otherwise help out with GZDoom modding. Some may be more helpful than others.

Main repository.

So far includes:

• ImageCropper: Crop around the empty space around a sprite and automatically adjust the offsets using SetPNG.exe or GrabPNG.exe, which must be located in the same folder as this executable.
• ZSDFEdit: ZDoom Strife Dialog Format Editor is a GUI tool designed to help with dialogue management and editing.
• MDEFGen: Parse MODELDEF scripts to automate frame creation.
• GLDEFSGen: Use the images in a folder to generate GLDEFS definitions for each file from a template file using keywords.
• MTAConvert: Read .obj data and output an array with the vertices.
• PresetGen: Read XML files and generate an alias for KEYCONF that you'd bind to a command in MENUDEF or via console.

Requirements are individual for each project (though most if not all require .NET Core 3.1 x86 Runtime). See the descriptions for more information. The downloads for each tool are on the Releases page in the respective project. Those that come as a zip tend to have a manual inside. Those that don't, usually contain the manual in the form of CLI help. It's all documented in some way.

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• Some of the tools were one-off projects that may not be too polished. I am looking to improve those to the best of my abilities, so any feedback is welcome.
• I've had reports that some anti-virus programs have complained about some of the tools. Those are false positives. I haven't the slightest clue why this happens.

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• kodi, for suggesting most of the tools and supporting the development of ATK the entire time.
• Nash, for beta testing ImageCropper and suggesting almost all of the post-2.0.0 features. Also for reporting a metric fuckton of bugs related to ZSDFEdit.
• StroggVorbis, for suggesting to add support for importing compiled Strife dialogs in ZSDFEdit.

[Redneckerz]

Eyyy, this is neato stuff. Reminds me a bit of MTrop's utilities. These definitely have some good use.
You should also mention this to DooMad, who is actually looking for stuff like this to cover on his webpage. Might be worthwhile.

Either way, thanks for these.

[Accensus]

You're welcome! There are two more tools that I have yet to re-release. More precisely, ZSDFEdit and (maybe) UsageChecker (god, I suck at naming things). They still use .NET Framework 4.6, and likely will continue to use that for a while, but they are in need of a good refactor, so it might be a while.

[Rachael]

P.S. I'm not too sure if this should go in this forum or the Editors/Asset manipulation subforum. I'll leave it to the mods to decide.

That's a probably more useful place for this. These look like some useful tools, nice work!

[Accensus]

Thank you. And thanks for the move.

[Nash]

I would like to especially highlight - and consider this a PSA - the significance of ImageCropper, in particular.

This is a GAME CHANGER if you are working with a high asset count as what this does automates the process of cropping your sprites while setting the offsets for you. As most of you may know - (or if you don't, consider yourself educated now) sprites with lots of blank pixels around them are NOT GOOD as they consume a LOT of VRAM - this situation worsens exponentially when the user plays your mod with high quality resize modes enabled.

So being able to crop and set offsets for HUNDREDS of files in one go is something that many mod authors have asked for for a very long time and there's finally a tool that can do it for you with 1 click. I am going to urge everyone to use ImageCropper (especially for artists with similar workflows to mine where we generate hundreds and hundreds of frames from external content authoring tools) to make absolutely sure that the assets in your mods are optimized and not wasting texture memory.

Check out some before/after animations. You make think, "uh sure that's not a big deal, just crop them in Photoshop or whatever" but remember - this thing allows you to do it for hundreds, even thousands, of files in 1 go... all while making sure the offsets are correct... imagine doing all that by hand... ;)




(Notice the bounding box size differences, those are the PNG's borders before and after)

tl;dr ImageCropper is good shit. Use it. Love it.

[SanyaWaffles]

Honestly if I can find grabpng this might be useful, as someone who handles sprites in a much higher resolution and hates using photoshop for simple crop jobs.

[Jaska]

I've ZSDFEdit v1.2.0.exe. Is this still developed?

[Accensus]

@Nash: Wow, thank you! Happy to hear you are putting IC to good use.

@Sanya: http://baghead.drdteam.org/tools.xml It's part of DoomCrap. SetPNG also works. IC will prioritize GrabPNG if it finds both, though.

@Jaska: Yeah, it is, but I'm planning on doing some much-needed overhauls here and there.

[Jaska]

Good to know, It's very nice tool!

[Accensus]

Updated ImageCropper to 2.2.1.

I think with that bug out of the way, 2.2.1 is pretty much version final, unless something else pops up. In terms of functionality, I can't think of anything else to add without entering feature creep territory.

[SanyaWaffles]

grabpng gives me a 404 on the hosting. Oof.

[Accensus]

Get DoomCrap from that page I linked. GrabPNG is inside the zip. The independent downloads are dead, yeah.

[SanyaWaffles]

Ah, gotcha.

[kodi]

An interesting thing you can do with MTAConvert is if you've got say a torch model for your dungeon map, you can make a copy of the model and remove all but the part that's supposed to burn and make an obj of that. Run the result through MTAConvert, and you can now spawn fire particles (actors or A_SpawnParticle) on the exact vertices of the model that are supposed to be burning.