NetKeen Tile Migration Tool

A relatively new PCKF member asked for tile sheets of Ceilick's excellent unofficial The Universe Is Toast games. He wanted to put the graphics into NetKeen to make multiplayer maps in that style. Copying the right parts of the tile sheets would work, but tileinfo is trickier. Somebody suggested that tileinfo has to be set up manually, but I knew automating it wouldn't be too hard.

So I wrote the NetKeen Tile Migration Tool (NKTMT). It moves tiles and tileinfo from resources of an arbitrary chunk layout into existing NetKeen resources. The program requires an updated version FMod.dll (FleexCore2) for the NextGenGraphics class.

Download NetKeen Tile Migration Tool

nktmt.exe takes 22 command-line parameters, all required, in this order: source EGAGRAPH, source EGAHEAD, source EGADICT, source TLI, source unmasked tile start, source unmasked tile end, source masked tile start, source mask tile end, NK EGAGRAPH, NK EGAHEAD, NK EGADICT, NK GAMEMAPS, NK MAPHEAD, NK unmasked tile start, NK unmasked tile end, NK masked tile start, NK masked tile end, source infoplane icon count, NK infoplane icon count, NK unmasked 8x8 tile chunk, NK unmasked 8x8 count, NK masked 8x8 count.

For example, I used these parameters to put the Keen 8 (based on Keen 6) resources into NetKeen resources (named .CK4): egagraph.ck6 egahead.ck6 egadict.ck6 keen6.tli 438 2813 2814 5549 egagraph.ck4 egahead.ck4 egadict.ck4 gamemaps.ck4 maphead.ck4 777 2288 2289 5240 108 108 775 30 12

TliExtend 2

Quite a while back, I made some significant changes to TliExtend, the quick-and-dirty tileinfo extension utility. Quick summary:

• Has built-in help (try invoking it without any arguments)
• Can remove (truncate) tiles, and will ask for confirmation before doing so
• Supports merged maphead/tileinfo files with an optional argument

It's still not super well-tested, so if you run into any issues, please tell me. This build, like the last, requires FMod.dll, which is included with Abiathar.

Download TliExtend 2

TliExtend

Today in the #KeenModding IRC channel, I was helping a Keen modder who was working on adding new tiles to a source code-based mod. Getting Abiathar to load the extra tiles was fairly easy (even though it's the only Keen level editor that can handle extended tilesets). The tricky part was fixing the tileinfo file to include those extra tiles.

You see, the tileinfo format is planar, so the information for each tile is spread out all over the file, and at offsets determined by the number of tiles in the file. Therefore, it can't just be extended by writing a bunch of zeros at the end; the spaces for the new tiles have to be inserted throughout the file. That would, of course, be very painful to do by hand in a hex editor.

So, I quickly (in under five minutes!) wrote TliExtend to solve this very problem. It's not super well-tested, but it did what it had to do. Its syntax is fairly simple; it takes six command-line arguments, in this order: existing tileinfo file name, current number of background tiles, current number of foreground tiles, output tileinfo file name, new number of background tiles, and new number of foreground tiles.

Note that TliExtend does not support the shrinking of tileinfo files. (It won't prune tiles off the end, and will probably do nothing if you ask it to reduce tile counts.)

I'll probably include TliExtend in Abiathar's File Emitter, but you can download it now if you'd like. (Requires FMod.dll, which comes with Abiathar.)

Zhongkey: An On-Screen Chinese PinYin Keyboard

As you might know, I'm taking an online Mandarin Chinese course, so I frequently have to type PinYin (Latin letters with various accent marks on top, plus the U with diaeresis). The on-screen keyboard provided by the web app has some issues. Specifically, it always places the inserted character at the end of the text field plus a line break (?!), it requires me to use the mouse to focus the text field again after inserting a special character, it can't be moved outside the web app workspace, and it's missing some of the more unusual combinations (e.g. capitals with accents or U with diaeresis and accent). After a while, I got tired of it.

So I made a better one.

Written quickly in .NET, Zhongkey is a simple PinYin keyboard that also has keys for Spanish (I had extra space in the key grid). It makes sure focus stays on your text field instead of taking it when you click a key in the grid. It also always puts the character where your insertion point was.

Download Zhongkey

Press the Capitals button to change the characters to, well, the capitalized version. (It becomes Lowercase as well.) If you want to remove its stay-on-topness without closing it, press Demote. (That becomes Promote, which restores its topmostness.) The Focus button just makes it steal focus so you can drag it around on old systems. (If you turn down the Windows graphics settings, dragging non-focused windows looks weird.) Obviously, press the lettered buttons to insert that character.

Zhongkey requires .NET 4.5 and is a portable (no install necessary, no elevation necessary) app.

Enjoy!