tunglashor wrote:Hello friends!

Hopefully some of you will find this useful. It's a new tool I've been working on to enable editing of your Mugen select screen using a visual drag&drop interface.



I've had a stab at rendering the select screen as accurately as I could, though it's not perfect; in particular the alpha blending is only an approximation of how it looks in Mugen. I think it's close enough, in general.

To give an idea of how to use it, I've made a short video. Hopefully this demonstrates the basic idea:
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It should work with WinMugen, hi-res WinMugen and Mugen 1.0 (SFFv1 only though - for now, at least). The program reads from mugen.cfg and the system.def file of the selected motif, and tries to scale the screen accordingly; it should get it right for Mugen 1.0 but for hi-res WinMugen you need to use the setting available via the File -> Options menu.

Other options allow you to hide the top layer while dragging a character around - useful for some motifs where the grid is partially hidden. You can also choose to show or hide empty cells (note this only applies to the viewing mode within the tool; the actual Mugen setting is not affected). Also you can choose to disable alpha-blending (I added this because for screens that make heavy use of these effects the program can start to lag if it tries to display them all; this particularly applies if a transparent animation is used as the cell background).

Animations are not played, but the program will try to display single frames where possible. It tries to be clever and exclude any frames that might obscure the screen, but I included an option to randomize the frames in case one of these does get displayed. There's also the option to exclude animation elements completely.

What else... zipped characters are supported (although the program may be slow to load if a lot of these are included). Characters can be added from anywhere; if they're not located in the chars directory then an absolute path will be used (however zipped characters will be copied to the chars directory as this seems to be a Mugen requirement).

Cons: the more characters in the select screen, the longer the program will take to load. Flashier motifs with lots of alpha-blending can also slow things down, as mentioned. Other than that, no doubt there will be some select screen paramaters I've failed to implement correctly, so please feel free to post details of any errors you come across. Also any random crashes, weird behaviour, etc. Note: one issue I'm aware of is the width parameter, used with parallax elements for a perspective-type effect. I don't support this currently and just display the sprites as they are.

One more thing to be aware of: a backup is made of every file before it's first edited by the program - named (for example) "select.def.vselect.bak". The select screen def file is the only one ever edited, unless you use the "set as default motif" option which just updates the appropriate line in mugen.cfg.

Updates
11/10:
New option: display hidden characters
Shift-dragging now swaps dropped character with target character
New menu option to open character def file
More details...

16/10:
Character list added
New feature: drag/drop character file from Windows Explorer
More details...

15/11:
Added support for selecting/moving/inserting/replacing multiple characters
Added order list
New option to toggle drag/drop and shift-drag behaviour
More details...
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Enjoy! And as always any feedback is most appreciated
Download here.
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tunglashor wrote:
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] time! I had a lot of requests for a way to easily edit the 'maxmatches' values, so I've added a grid as shown:



Pretty self-explanatory I guess. Other than that, it should now also remember the size/position of the main window from the last time the program was used - another requested feature. Also fixed a couple of display glitches.

Thanks for all the feedback; as always, let me know if you find any bugs or have any problems/questions. Cheers :toffgoi:

tunglashor wrote:
Time for another [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
This time I've added a stage list:



It shows the characters in your roster, sorted by the stages they're currently using. The list is split into two categories:

[li]Included: All stages that will appear in the stage selection list in VS mode. So, all stages assigned to characters with "includestage" not set to 0, and all Extra Stages.[/li]
[li]Excluded: Any stages assigned only to characters with "includestage" set to 0, and any other stages in the Stages folder that aren't being used.[/li]

You can drag characters from one stage to another, or from the select grid onto a stage, etc. Note that a stage becomes "included" if any character assigned to it has "includestage" set to 1 - so for example, in the setup shown above, if you were to open Captain Commando's properties and tick the Include Stage box, the stage would automatically move to the Included section. By the same logic, if this box was unticked for Ken then his stage would move to the Excluded section - unless it was also present in the Extra Stages section.

Other options: if you right-click on a character or stage in the list you can use the Include/Exclude Stage options to change the status of the stage, or No Stage to clear the selected characters' stages (and so remove them from the list). Also, if you want to you can drag a stage .def file from Windows Explorer onto the list to add it. Although all stages from the Stages folder are automatically included in the list, this allows you to add stages from other locations if you wish.

Spoiler:

I hope this provides an intuitive way of managing stages. It was a fairly complex update and I haven't had a lot of free time to test it so please, let me know if you find any bugs or any other problems. All feedback is welcome of course. Enjoy :)