2009-11-09

Tool: Binary data to embeddable char array

Sometimes there’s a need to embed some little bit of binary data in the executable. The reasons may vary – perhaps it is for a resource you want to exist even if data files are missing, or it could be even something you want to “hide” from some curious wannabe-hackers.

In the past years my typical use case was as follows. I used to make “64 KB intros” (such as this one), and for those I needed to embed a few data files to the executable as object data, so that I could exploit compression of the executable packer without writing a proper compression tool myself (such as UPX).

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2009-10-17

Tool: pngprep

When programming visuals, I often need to fix color values of pixels in image data where alpha is 0. Here’s a little tool called pngprep which can do some pre-processing of image data and save the result as a 32 bpp png file.
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2009-10-16

Tool update: psdslayer 1.1

A while ago I posted psdlayerstga 1.0. I have now updated it to support saving to PNG files, which is also now the default output format. The tool also got renamed to psdslayer, since I was constantly imagining, and even mistyping, the name to be “psd slayer” rather than “psd layers“. And I find it funny.
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2009-10-11

Steps and Pulses

A few years ago I read the book Texturing and Modeling: A Procedural Approach (Ebert et al.) and found some low level “step” and “pulse” primitives used for generating procedural graphics. It didn’t take a long time to notice that those are actually really useful in many other situations as well.

A generic pattern is that some value changes its value from a to b over t iterations, and you want something other to move along from c to d in the same time. Implementation is easier when the transition from a to b is just normalized to [0..1]. After that it’s really easy to map it to any range just by another multiplication (d – c) and adding an offset (c).

The “boxStep” function does the normalization part described above. However, just linear movement is actually quite boring, so the funky part here is that you can just switch “boxStep” to a “smoothStep” and there we go, movement along a smooth curve which feels better. Or you can map the boxStep result to a different function which takes in a value in the [0..1] range and outputs a value in the same range, e.g. sqrt().

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