Parchment Generation

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afritz1
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Parchment Generation

Post by afritz1 »

I've been wondering about how Arena and Daggerfall generate various "pop-up" parchment textures for their interfaces. In Arena, it seems to only require a single file called PARCH.CIF, but I'm not sure what to do with that because it isn't a very complete image by itself (just a corner of parchment), so I was curious about whether there is some similarity with Daggerfall in that regard. Does it perhaps take some chunks out of it or do some flips/rotations to generate the sides and body of the parchment? Or maybe there are other parchment images still hidden in the game files?

R.D.
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Re: Parchment Generation

Post by R.D. »

Well, Daggerfall has parchment tiles for all the sides and corners, and one for filling in the middle, in SPOP.RCI. You can look at them with Daggerfall Imaging 2. The parchment is then automatically sized using these tiles according to the size of the text being displayed. If Arena only has a single corner, that seems different from Daggerfall.

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afritz1
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Re: Parchment Generation

Post by afritz1 »

I figured it out. It was because my code for loading raw (headerless) CIF files assumed that each file only has one image. Thanks for the tip about Daggerfall Imaging 2; that allowed me to determine how many images there should be. There aren't any differences between Arena and Daggerfall for the parchment layout after all. Both PARCH.CIF and SPOP.RCI are ordered exactly the same.

Narf the Mouse
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Re: Parchment Generation

Post by Narf the Mouse »

Check out "nine-slice sprites". I'd explain more, but *someone stayed up all night coding, so I'm quite tired.

* No idea who... :nonchalant:
Previous experience tells me it's very easy to misunderstand the tone, intent, or meaning of what I've posted. If you have questions, ask.

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