Exult Forum

Hi,

in exult studio, if I right-click on a shape and choose "export frame", i can export the first frame. And if I choose "edit", I can edit the first frame in GIMP.

Is there a way to export (or edit) frames other than the first? Thank you

There is a 'frames' button in the lower right corner of the window; near it there is also a spin button (une up arrow and one down arrow) and a text field. You can (1) click the button to display all frames of all shapes and then edit the frame of your choice by right-clicking it, (2) use the text field or the spin button to select the frame you want to edit and right-click it.

Gosh, I hadn't seen the "frames" button. Thank you very much.

Could be nice if there was an option to export all frames of a given shape.
---------
Peter M Dodge aka Wizardry Dragon
Lead Designer,
Ultima VII: The Feudal Lands

Now that you mention, I recall suggesting it some time ago -- maybe a couple of years or so. I think I will implement it now.

Hm. And now that I am at it; maybe I could also make it work in conjunction with the Gimp plug-in. I would be useful...

Yes, that would be cool.

Yes please, that would be extremely useful

*chuckles*
That would be handy. Then again, when I would have found it personally useful I wouldn't have been able to use it unless someone has managed to get Exult Studio working in Win98 again.

Paulon for extracting frames it would sure work. Working with the data files works on Windows 9x, "only" the actual game editing inside Exult with Exult Studio doesn't work.
I know, the "only" is a rather big hurdle

Oh well. The old dos command line tools did the job fine anyway. It's amazing how much easier they can be to use than Windows at times.
I never bothered with the Studio because of the Win98 issue and because I only upgraded to XP a couple of weeks back. I need to take a look when I get the time.

I have some ideas on how we might manage to get it to work on Win 9x; it would require maintaining separate snapshots for 9x and NT, though (although the method would likely work on 2000/XP too). It is a longshot, though... and I would need to know if there is enough of a demand to do it.

The demand would sure be nice to know, your longshot might be a good idea if people still use Windows 9x and Windows 2k (because AFAIR we have connection issues with W2k as well).

Why not just have the two applications communicate through some OS-independant channel like files or TCP/IP, instead of various types of IPC?
Personally I have no need for Win9x support though.

I probably should update it to use TCP/IP.

I think the problem is that I had EStudio communicate with Exult using a Unix-style socket. If we change this to use a port-socket (which I'd have to learn how to use), would that make the problems go away?

If we change this to use a port-socket (which I'd have to learn how to use), would that make the problems go away?

I don't think so; Exult/ES communication in Windows does not use them, but uses 'pipes' (Win XP) or 'mailslots' (Win 9x/2000) instead. The longshot(s) that I can try are: (1) theoretically, Win 9x/2000 support pipes too; (2) using Windows messages, namely WM_COPYDATA; (3) DDE. I would *really* prefer not to have to mess with the last one, though.

The ability to export/import all frames to/from pngs has been added; I will look into the 'edit shp' over the weekend.

I know it's unrelated, but while you're looking into Exult Studio, could you check out this one as well:
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.ph ... tid=102335

It's preventing me from organising chunks into conveniently browsable categories, which in turn makes a big pain to do multimap terrain design.

What I was thinking (not knowing much about Windows) was that if we used a different socket type, then the Windows versions could use the same method, and we wouldn't need so much conditional code.

Alun: I'll look into that bug in the next few days.

WinSock of course isn't 100% compatible with Berkeley Sockets so while much of the code can be reused, its probably just easier if I rewrote the Win32 only with it using a socket port bound to loopback only.

The mailslot stuff is a hack, and I kind of regret writing it now (it worked in testing but ugh). I first wrote the pipe implementation but Win9x can't be named pipe servers so I hacked in using mailslots. Later Win2K starting having issues with the pipe buffer filling up as far as I can tell and losing the connection in some cases so I used mailslots for it too.

Rewriting the connection to open a TCP connection with Winsock2 isn't hard so I should probably do it.

And i think I'm done. If anyone wants to test it out, here is a new servewin32.cc file that replaces the pipes and mailslots and instead uses Sockets. You'll need to compile your version of exult and exult studio replacing the file in the server directory with this one. You'll also need to link to the ws2_32 library.

http://www.users.on.net/~triforce/servewin32.cc

I'll commit it into cvs once I'm satisified that it's going to work properly as a replacement.

-Colourless Dragon

The Winsock server fails to connect in Windows XP; I made a clean build from source of both Exult & Studio just to be sure. More precisely, it disconnects almost as soon as it connects; a collateral effect is to make Exult slow and unresponsive as it keeps trying to connect to ES. stdout has dozens of 'Client disconnected.' lines, with a couple of 'Connected to client' lines in the middle; studio_out has alternating 'Connected to server' and 'Disconnected from server' lines.

I've uploaded a new one with a slight change. I had IO non blocking on recv but that is going to cause problems because exult only calls recv when it knows there should be a packet and if it doesn't block the recv call can return an error that Exult wont handled, so I've changed it so recv will now block. That might have been the cause of your connection issues.

No, it still happens. But the ratio of 'Client disconnected.' to 'Connected to client' is now 2-to-1, instead of a dozen-to-1.

Perhaps instead of trying to switch the communication engine in Windows entirely we could make it consistent across versions of Windows -- for example, by using a pair anonymous pipes whose handles are distributed between client and server as described here.

Ok. I found and fixed the problem (as well as some others).

Since I'm now satisified the changes are stable, i've committed them to cvs.

Working perfectly now; good work. Time now to test in Win9x/2000.

Is pretty stable for me on Win XP Home Ed.

---------
Peter M Dodge aka Wizardry Dragon
Lead Designer,
Ultima VII: The Feudal Lands