Gash: The Superior xGAGRAPH Editor

There have been murmurings in the Keen community of bugs, limitations, and general shortcomings of KeenGraph. KeenGraph is the more modern replacement for the original ModKeen, and it is a very good tool. Sadly, it is written in QuickBASIC and is therefore difficult to maintain and extend. The main issue I find is that there is no way to give it custom chunk offsets - every time somebody mods another game, the program must be updated or forked to add configuration for that game's EGA arrangement. KeenGraph also does not support CGA or VGA graphics. (The main graphics file can be called EGAGRAPH, CGAGRAPH, or VGAGRAPH depending on the adapter supported.)

So, I plan on soon starting a replacement called Gash - xGAGRAPH Shell. I will address the following issues with KeenGraph:

• Language. Gash will be written in .NET to take advantage of existing FleexCore2 (FMod) functionality. This will greatly help debuggability and extensibility.
• Output format. KeenGraph only exports BMP images, which do not support transparency. Masking is done with a designated "transparent" color. Translucent colors are produced using a strange color-shifting system that I haven't been able to use successfully. Gash will support the export and import of PNG images, interpreting a transparent pixel to be an invisible black pixel (transparent) and a translucent pixel of any color to be that color unmasked.
• Tolerance. I personally enjoy the Paint.NET editor very much, but it butchers the 16-color bitmaps into something... not 16-colored. This causes corruption when the images are imported by ModKeen or KeenGraph. Gash will use the .NET image loading routines to accept any bit depth. If slightly wrong colors are used (I'm still not sure whether EGA white is supposed to be $FFFFFF or $FCFCFC), it will look through the palette for the closest match, use it if it is found, and warn if it's really far off.
• xGA format. KeenGraph only deals with graphic-planar EGA, as far as I can tell. Gash will support CGA and VGA as well, and row- and byte-planar EGA if any Keen-ish games actually use it.
• Configurability. KeenGraph does not support the use of custom chunk offsets. This is a very simple thing to do with FleexCore2, so Gash will support it.

Work on this may start tomorrow. I hope to have this done will all these features by Keen Day 2015.