Public Commander Keen Forum

Your website will be sorely missed.

Are you talking about the website itself or my tools? I didn't think you'd be able to read all those German articles and walkthroughs.

But is seems like you don't need to worry too much about the tools, thanks to the awesome Malvineous. The tools will soon be hosted on shikadi.net, so they will stay available. Probably for as long as his site and the KeenWiki and ModdingWiki are available.

I know someone who speaks (reads?) German, they've provided help where necessary. It's an interesting window onto the DOS gamingis community.

Well, that's nice to hear/read. I just finished uploading to http://k1n9duk3.shikadi.net and all the DOS gaming stuff is still there.

The layout is based on my old ohost.de site that vanished a few years ago. The layout of the arcor.de page with it's two separate sections doesn't make much sense now that the "KB" label is pretty much gone.

tatataaa!

After looking through this thread again and updating/removing all the dead links, I realized that someone asked for a quick level switching option for the Keen Vorticons level viewer. When revisiting my project folder I noticed that I had already started implementing that but never released an updated version. It had some bugs, so that might have been the reason.

Anyway, I fixed that version and rewrote the PNG exporting code, so the exporting is a lot faster now. I also added the mass export option that was introduced in GalaxyView 1.6.

I was thinking about adding an option to display the in-game sprites in the levels instead of the hexadecimal representation of the numbers in the actor plane. Is that worth the efford, or are there other tools now, that already provide these features?

Because if I'm going to implement sprite display, I would probably need to implement it for all games (including Rescue Rover, Shadow Knights, Dangerous Dave 2 and maybe even Hovertank) and they all use slightly different sprite formats.

My QBasic program does that, but it runs in Dosbox and is as slow as a wet week. Not sure of anything else.

Well, some of the Keen: Vorticons level editors appear to have some kind of sprite display implemented, but I'm not sure these actually load the sprite images from the game's sprite file. Some of them might just load pre-defined sprite images that come with the editor.

I finished implementing the routines for all games, so extracting all the images and converting them to PNG format works perfectly fine now. The rest is mostly just a matter of mapping the numbers in the info plane to the sprite numbers.

Most of them, like the original KEENEDIT have a graphics file they load the sprites from. (In fact KEENEDIT stored the tile graphics too.) I think iKeen loaded them, and Abiathar likewise (can) load from the original graphics files.

It took way too long, but the new versions of my level viewer for Keen: Vorticons are finally online

Sprite displaying, mass PNG exporting... now the Vorticon Viewer has pretty much all the features that the Galaxy Viewer has. Hooray.

Mass PNG exporting: Hooray!

Tinkering with mechanical keyboards is surprisingly easy and fun. Took the caps off my old Steelseries 6G to give it a proper cleaning, fitted it with the O-rings that came with my Novatouch, then flipped the spacebar and some mod keys. Goodbye Emacs pinky, forever!

Silencing rings do make a world of a difference with MX blacks. The landing is admittedly a little mushy, but the lower travel distance makes typing a lot easier as I bottom out due to force of habit coming from Topre. The sound is also nicer... sounds almost clicky when I really lay into it.

Unfortunately, as a side effect, I now really want to buy some ridiculously expensive caps for the Nova...

Nospike wrote: ↑Sun Feb 19, 2017 11:50 Tinkering with mechanical keyboards is surprisingly easy and fun. Took the caps off my old Steelseries 6G to give it a proper cleaning, fitted it with the O-rings that came with my Novatouch, then flipped the spacebar and some mod keys. Goodbye Emacs pinky, forever!

Silencing rings do make a world of a difference with MX blacks. The landing is admittedly a little mushy, but the lower travel distance makes typing a lot easier as I bottom out due to force of habit coming from Topre. The sound is also nicer... sounds almost clicky when I really lay into it.

Unfortunately, as a side effect, I now really want to buy some ridiculously expensive caps for the Nova...

Slightly off-topic.

back on topic:
it seems to me that the VorticonsViewer v.1.3 stopped displaying the level title in the window-manager header...

btw: shikadi.net/keenwiki/VorticonView

I used this program to export level maps of Flames On Earth, The Sqeek Battle, and The Morticore. I can say that this is a really nice and useful program. The only thing I think it could need is a way to remove the borders when exporting them (so people wouldn't have to do it manually), but that's just a minor thing.