PICSee Dust requires Color QuickDraw and a 68020 processor or better. It runs OK under emulation on a PowerMac. System 7.1 or later is required.
What is it?
PICSee Dust is a general purpose PICS viewer. It will also save you lots of time and effort if you work with PICS files and need to edit all of the frames of the PICS on a "global" scale.
For example, what do you usually do if you need to crop all of the frames of a PICS file? Probably export each frame as a PICT file, crop each frame manually, and merge all of the files back into the PICS file. Not for the lazy. Well no more! You can specify to PICSee Dust a crop area to apply to all of the frames or to a range of the frames. You can do this by using the convenient marquee or typing in the values yourself. PICSViewer also provides nice tools to shrinking/growing the marquee, giving you precise control over what area to crop.
In addition to cropping the PICS file, you can also tell PICSee Dust to composite the frames together into one PICT file, side by side or top to bottom. Good for placing all those sprites next to each other in one neat PICT file, all nicely cropped.
You can also split the PICS files into a series of PICT files, and merge several PICT files into a PICS file.
PICSee Dust's operations are intended mainly for game developers creating sprites in the PICS file format (thus the comprehensive crop-and-composite function).
NOTE: PICSee Dust is a RAM-based viewer and editor. In other words, all of the frames of the PICS file are loaded into memory at once. On the good side, animations can be optimized for speed; on the bad side, this takes up memory considerably. Make sure you have enough memory before trying to load that mega-mouthful PICS file you have lying around. On a more cheerful note, the PICS operations (composite, split, merge) can be done WITHOUT using the PICS viewer, thereby reducing memory requirements significantly.
My apologies
Sorry there's no comprehensive manual yet. Writing a manual takes A LOT of time, which I currently deem better taken up coding improvements to PICSee Dust. The next release will see major changes in the program. I will:
- do a total re-write of the PICS viewer engine, allowing for less memory-hungry viewing methods.
- add paint-program-like features, akin to CelPaint (with onion-skinning and all that good stuff). In other words, full PICS editing.
- add support for alpha channels: splitting, manipulating, and other goodies (half is done already, but isn't available in this version).
- add a manual [is there someone out there who is really kind write one for me? Please? Pretty pretty please with a cherry on top?]
- make a "thin-challenged" version; read: PowerPC native
- balance the federal budget
- Hmm, nope, scratch that last one!
Be on my list of rabid users!
If you like PICSee Dust, and would like to be contacted whenever a new version is sent out, email me and I'll add you to my list of PICSee Dust users (which by the way, currently has 1 member: me). In a week, you will also coincidentally get a torrent of junk mail and telephone calls from annoying tele-salesmen. Just kidding...
Anyway, I really like this program and intend on supporting it for some time to come. So send me your support! A programmer likes to feel needed too <sniff, sniff>.
Send all inquiries, comments, suggestions, idle talk, extortion attempts, etc to:
starlabs@aol.com.
Some notes... (Heed them - they will make your life easier!!!)
If there is no marquee selection, the following are possible:
* Playing the PICS
* Rewind: Up key
* Step back: Left key
* Play: Tab key
* Step forward: Right key
* Fast forward: Down key
After you have selected an area of the PICS with the marquee, the following are possible:
* Moving the selection:
* With mouse: Keep space key down, put mouse inside marquee and drag
* With keyboard: use arrow keys (keep down shift key for 5-pixel increments)
* Resizing the selection
* With mouse: move mouse towards border of marquee and drag
* With keyboard:
* Shrinking the selection: Keep down the option key and use the arrow keys
* Growing the selection: Keep down the control key and use the arrow keys
* Playing the PICS
* Use the same keys, but keep the command key down
Shortcuts:
• Play PICS at fastest possible speed of computer: Keep down shift key when clicking on the play button
• Draw marquee when playing PICS: Turn on the caps lock key and play the PICS; the marquee will be drawn as well (this also works in conjunction with above shortcut)
• When opening a PICS file in viewer:
* Option key: keeping this down reverses what animation method is currently used. If the animation method uses the PICS file's depth, using the option key will instead set the animation method to using the monitor's depth. This shortcut applies to the opened file only (it doesn't change the preferences).
* Shift key: the larger viewer window will be opened instead, regardless of dimensions of the PICS file.
TECHNICAL INFORMATION
* Delta pictures
By default, PICS which use delta pictures (frame-differentiated pictures) are shown in the same way as standard PICS. If you wish to view the delta pictures differently, turn on the caps lock key when opening a PICS file for viewing. If the PICS file uses delta pictures, the second frame and on will show a gray pattern where the picture is not drawn.
* Grayscale (256 grays) PICS
For some reason, fidelity is lost if you crop or assemble the grayscale PICS file at the files's depth (8-bit). Probably because the animation buffer is a color 8-bit buffer, not a grayscale buffer. Best results are achieved if you dither the resulting output to 16-bit or 32-bit.
A fix requires that I find a way to determine if an image is grayscale or not, and a way to create a grayscale offscreen GWorld. Since I don't use grayscale PICS much, this is not particularly high on my list of things to implement. If it's important to you, tell me and I'll bump it up on the list.
Credit to where credit's due:
Thanks to Norman Basham for his monitors code.
Thanks to Eddy J. Gurney for his select multiple files code
Thanks to James "im" Beninghaus for his marquee code
Thanks to Steven Sheets for his article on PICS files in MacTutor (now MacTech)
Thanks to Vern Jensen for taking a beta-look at the program
Thanks to all others whom I've forgotten to mention...
The control buttons were "lifted" from StrataVision 3D, a fine 3D rendering program. The next version will incorporate original buttons.
Version History
12/2/95: Made slight changes for public release of source code. Added an alpha-channel "sneak preview" feature. Use option key when clicking on any of the control buttons (play, rewind, etc) when working with a 32-bit PICS file which has an alpha channel.
11/23/95: Gave the user interface a "gray 3D" facelift. Some may like it, some may not. The program looks solid for the time being. Named 1.0 and released to the public.
Yes! Fixed the 0x4000 Rowbytes bug: frames for the offscreen gworld in the PICS viewer were being placed side by side. Deep-depth PICS with large number of frames would cause the rowBytes of the pixmap to be greater than 0x4000. When CopyBits is called, wham-bang-goodbye. Now instead of placing them side by side, the frames are placed one on top of the other, resulting in a rowBytes that should almost always be less than 0x4000 and thereby avoiding the crash. Hey, it ain't my fault the system imposes a 0x4000 restriction on the rowBytes. The OS is showing it's age and it ain't pretty... This one was a real puzzler.
11/15/95: Fixed(?) update problem when dialogs were dismissed but another dialog or lengthy operation prevented event loop from updating the other windows promptly. Own windows get updated, but windows from other processes must still wait.
Changed preferences dialog (again), this time uses System 6 Control Panel method of scrolling icon options and changing panes.
Changed compositing dialog box - now all items are in Geneva 9, as originally intended - this was achieved by fiddling the TextEdit fields of the edit text items of the dialog box.
11/13/95: Added a progress window for opening, compositing, merging, and splitting files.
Fixed compositing bug where delta pictures would cause problems if only a frame range was specified (since they're based on changes from the previous frame, and I was starting at the initial frame range, not the first picture!)
Add fancy-shmancy about box.
Updated preferences, compositing dialog box.
11/11/95: First beta version sent out
Qoute of the day
"Work is a fine thing - as long as it doesn't take up too much of your spare time."
Legalesian
PICSee Dust 1.0 is free. The program however is copyrighted by yours truly. All rights reserved, you know. You may distribute the program and it's accompanying docs freely, in any format or medium (including a psychic medium if you wish), as long as all the files are distributed together. If your computer for whatever reason decides to form a local chapter of the CPU Boosters Union, don't blame me. If your computer wakes you up in bed in the middle of the night asking for some more electricity, don't blame me. Any damage to your computer resulting from the usage of PICSee Dust can be blamed squarely on Apple - they made your computer and it should have known better than to lose your data. Give it a good spanking to tell it who the boss really is - you - and to make it think twice before eating up that accounting spreadsheet from the front office. Finally, this incredibly boring tirade can be blamed on the gluttony of litigation out there today. Stop the madness!!!
