I have been writing short programs for myself to convert resources from other games to a more doom friendly format, and I think I found something that might be of use to others. In particular, I wrote a program that takes effects sprites in RPGMakerVX style PNG format to Doom PNG format, all laid out in nicely named PNG files ready to be imported into SLADE.
This might not strike you as particularly useful at first glance, but I think it opens doors to harness the efforts provided by a different modding community. The effects made by people from the RPGMaker VX community would work well as new splash effects, puff effects, explosions, and projectiles, and have likely never been seen before in the Doom modding scene, which would give your wad more apparent originality. In particular, one guy, LexusX, has posted a library of nearly three hundred effect animations into his deviant-art gallery, all in RPGMakerVX format. (Which you can find here, here, and here.)This program I wrote will allow you to take any of those hundreds of effects and use them in ZDoom with very little trouble. If anybody knows of any other cache's of RPGMakerVX style effect graphics, this program will work on those, too.
I have included a sample wad demonstrating what these effects look like in game. The wad contains the graphics and decorate code for two new missiles: rocket2 and rocket3, both of which are just like [wiki]rocket[/wiki], but have different explosion effects.
All RPGMakerVX effects animations have frames 192 pixels wide and 192 pixels tall. They are arranged on "sprite sheets" that have five frames per row and as many rows as needed to finish off the animation. My program just takes the single PNG file and separates it automatically into as many PNG files are needed to fully play the animation. Because the frames are 192 by 192, they will require scaling to fit into Zdoom and may cause performance lags when used too frequently.
The program itself is run on the command line:
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java -jar RPGVX2Doom.jar <name of file to convert>This is the first time I have ever put a program I wrote online for others to use. I'm not sure how to write a "polite" command line utility. If anybody else who has written helpful doom programs in the past has advice for me, let me know. I hope this is useful to somebody. If anybody uses this and enjoys it, please let me know. If anybody tries to use it, and it doesn't work, also please let me know!
I could not attach the program (because it is a .jar) or the sample wad (because it is 511k) so I have put them in a rar file I uploaded to rapidshare here. Instead, I will attach a couple of images of LexusX's effect work.
Thank you.
