Tharify

Keen Day 2015 is coming up with a quickness, and I don't have anything particularly groundbreaking coming up. However, I do have two fun little things related to Abiathar that might be interesting to a few people, one of which is AbiatharOS.

The other is Tharify. My plan for Tharify is to create a conversion process from Vorticons to Galaxy and back so that Abiathar can be used for Vorticons editing. This probably won't be particularly useful - Mindbelt is a great Vorticons editor and has the advantage of actually being designed for that engine/style - but it's a fun small project for me. (To be honest, I'm really doing it to see if I can.) I've only had two coding sessions on it so far, but it's about halfway done already.

Currently, it can convert the Vorticons EGA resources into KeenGraph-style tile sheet bitmaps. The Vorticons tiles become the foreground plane; sprites are squished into infoplane icons. The background only has two tiles: a blank black square and a "not a link" text. That special tile signals the Galaxy-to-Vorticons level converter to not perform link adjustment on it. (Vorticons uses relative coordinates for switch links; Galaxy uses absolute.)

I'm still working on the command-line argument processing. Once there's a working implementation of that, I can actually test all this code I've been blindly writing.