Bay 12 Games Forum

SITREP Saturday #54: "Map Zoom QoL" - A summary of map zooming features, on top of the fully-upscaled UI layout introduced last week.

SITREP Saturday #53: "Full UI Upscaling" - Last time I added map zooming, but what if you didn't need to zoom in because *EVERYTHING* is larger?!

Yeah they should work if you've got 'em around. I loaded up a bunch of different .ans from the past several decades and everything worked okay except for the animated ones, which is out of scope so I had to block importing of those (generally a minority, but there sure are more of them the further back you go! really interesting stuff to research...).

Progress on Cogmind has recently led to numerous engine improvements (and a few bug fixes), so combined with feature request patches from the past few years we're getting an official release for the new and improved REXPaint!

Big items this time around include autoscaling of font bitmaps, .gpl (GIMP) palette support, and even better .ans (ANSI art) support--for the first time REXPaint can automatically import a format other than its own!

First, the full changelog...

REXPaint 1.70 (240110) changelog:

• NEW: Support for automated upscaling of font bitmaps (see manual under Custom and Extended Fonts)
• NEW: .ans file automated importing and conversion (ANSI art)
• NEW: .gpl (GIMP) palette support
• NEW: Ctrl-v during active file naming dialog or Text tool pastes text from system clipboard (single line only)
• NEW: Reopening REXPaint recalls the last glyph index and brush foreground/background color in use
• NEW: Remap all layer colors to closest from current palette (Shift-Alt-p, or Ctrl-Shift-Alt-p for all unlocked layers)
• NEW: Added full list of valid color names to skins.xt file for reference
• NEW: Command line support for creating new image files (see manual Appendix H)
• NEW: Command line support for opening REXPaint with specific image selected (see manual Appendix H)
• NEW: Command line support for exporting specific image as PNG (see manual Appendix H)
• MOD: .ans export format optimized for reduced file size
• MOD: C:DDA image exports now also reference custom Unicode glyph assignments in cases where users may want a custom font layout besides CP437
• MOD: Updated installation instructions with new MSVC DLL download location
• MOD: Manual Appendix H rewritten to encompass multiple types of command line options
• MOD: Manual Appendix I changes official C:DDA font reference to reflect switch from Unifont to Terminus, provided on website Resources page
• FIX: Reloading all images via Browse window blocked further mouse interaction with some popups like Resize window
• FIX: Potential rare crash due to multithreaded logging

You can download REXPaint here, and note that as of 1.04 it's also available on itch.io.

.ANS Importing!

While REXPaint has had .ans exporting for many years and could therefore be used to create traditional ANSI art, only art created from scratch using REXPaint's native format could be used to do this. Now .ans files can be imported as well!

Simply drop any .ans files into the /images/ directory structure, and on startup if REXPaint does not see any corresponding .xp files by the same name, it will automatically convert them for editing access. Although REXPaint only edits .xp files directly, you can re-export to .ans at any time. Original .ans files remain unchanged unless you choose to overwrite one with an export.

REXPaint will import and view .ans files even when ANSI mode is not active, though properly exporting to .ans again would require that mode to be active as usual. (Note: REXPaint strips SAUCE metadata when it converts .ans to .xp, and therefore does not contain any on export, either.)

Animated .ans files are beyond the scope of REXPaint and ignored--only static ANSI art is compatible.

Here is a demo of .ans conversion:



We've had text and image file importing for a while, but those are more fiddly, while this automated feature was a much bigger production. I spent a while researching the format in order to enable imports, and as a result was also able to optimize REXPaint's .ans exports to reduce the resulting file size.

(Note that one of these optimizations involves giving "cursor" instructions to skip over empty space, but if you're intending to use REXPaint's .ans exports with Discord's ```ansi feature, know that Discord's implementation of ANSI is pretty terrible and incomplete so you'll probably have to set the new ansOutputNoCursorShift cfg option to make images containing that sort of empty space compatible over there.)

Some other new features in action


Over a decade since the first release and REXPaint is still going :)

I've still got lots more planned, including huge features, but, you know, when I get to it :P

Found the 'scrap engine' on my third run.
That was fun, got through to the factory level and then some more before the inevitable YASD

Oh hey martinuzz! Heh, the Scrap Engine is pretty chaotic and leads to all sorts of weird and fun stuff. It can get super powerful later on, but it really helps to know how to coax it to do what you want. Right now it's not integrated into the plot yet, just dropped onto the floor for you on finding that map, but when the next new expansion is released it'll have a more proper introduction, and also a little manual (currently players just share the main tips on the Discord).

Also is it just me or is Bay 12 not sending out notification emails??? I doubt that, but I've always had email notifications set, don't have it blocked or filtered in my gmail account, and there's never anything in my spam, I just don't get B12 emails at all... Always used to work for like 10 years, then suddenly stopped working I'm not sure when, some time in the past few months? Pretty annoying not getting those :/

Time to celebrate the final day of 2023 with the Cogmind giveaway...
Congratulations to the winners, Frumple and martinuzz, keys sent!

Happy New Years all

Yeah that definitely goes against the spirit of the whole thing (or even being on Bay 12 at all in that case...), and certainly not something I would condone.