Software Developer for Symbiant Technologies, full time web developer. Mapping and modding since the days of Doom 2. Sci-fi and cyberpunk fan. My most famous map was "co_angst", the first ever combat map for Natural Selection. I have developer a useful little app called "ModMaker" for working with the Source game engine. I am the Lead Developer for "Exterminatus - Rival Species 2" a Warhammer 40,000 mod for Source.

Report RSS Mod Maker V 1.9.0

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Since the inclusion of the weapon editor in V1.7 I have not felt the desire to add new features, with a couple of notable exceptions. Firstly the Chapter Maker really wanted to be able to show you the thumbnails to your chapters, so they look like they do when you're picking them in-game and secondly to be able to draw on sprite sheets to define sub-image regions. The trouble with these features is that they both require the ability to show images in Valve's own homebew file format VTF.

The Source SDK ships with a tool to let you convert images to VTF, but not back from VTF, so I had to look elsewhere. My favourite 3rd party VTF editing tool VTFEdit, uses it's own C++ library VTFLib to work with VTFs. VTFLib is licensed under the LGPL, so I can use it and bundle it with MM. After converting all the hundreds of lines of imports for VTFLib to VB.NET that MM is written in it crashed like a bitch with no diagnostic info. So I had to scrap that approach. But wait their is also a command line tool from the authors of VTFLib!

The command line app VTFCmd does the job, converting VTF images into file formats .NET can load. Great. So I set about running VTFCmd in the background to convert VTFs as I need them. Except when I check to make sure it's worked and the output image file is there .NET cannot see it. I cna see the output image in windows explorer, but IO.File.Exists says it's not there. Turns out VTFCmd is holding on to the windows file handle even after it shuts down.

As as side effect of this the desired features are "kind of" working, but cannot overwrite or clean up the temporary images that VTFCmd generates, which leads to more bugs. But I think it's worth it for the eye candy.

If you are a C++, C#/VB.NET coder who wants to earn a bit of cash, i'm willing to pay for a .NET DLL that can painlessly load VTFs into System.Drawing.Bitmap objects.

In an effort to try and diagnose the woes of modders who are having problems with MM i've included a new Steam Information window, under the help menu, in this version. This Steam Info feature displays all the registry keys, environment variable and local file paths that MM looks at while doing it's job.

Since 1.7 i've added a lot more error checking to MM to make it more resilient, this has got it working on several more modders machines. If you are having problems with MM please let me know. I am actively trying to fix bugs as I learn about them.

ModMaker V 1.9.0
Mod Maker Version 1.9.0
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knifes_96
knifes_96

Your map maker program just crashes btw

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