Buyog's Lair

On the 13th Day of Christmas...

Wednesday, January 06, 2010

Here's one final gift I wanted to put out there today for the MUGEN community as we say goodbye to Christmas 2009. Over the past couple of years I've created a few tools in Visual Basic 6 ('cuz the Old Skool is the best school) that have been useful to me when I need something a little more lightweight than Fighter Factory, MEE, or MCM. Last night, I realized that there might be other people in MUGEN-land (developers and otherwise) that might find value in them, so I decided to share.

MUGENSound

This is a simple tool for previewing and extracting .wav audio files from a MUGEN .snd file. It's useful to me when I'm coding up something quick in a text editor and can't remember the group and number of a specific sound effect I need and added earlier (it's also useful for dumping .wav files for sound effects of moves that Parasite has permission of their creators to steal & copy, which is how I personally use it most often). Just click the folder button to tell it the path to the .snd file, and it will populate the list box with all of the sounds it contains, identified by (group,number). Highlight a single sound and hit the single-triangle play button, and it will play that sound. Hit the triple-arrow button, and it will start to play all of the sounds in the list (the X button cancels the process). The disk button gives you the option to save the sound file as a .wav that you can use for other things (provided of course that you have permission if you're going to use it in your own MUGEN creations).

AIRCheck

I built this tool in a speed run last night to help me track down some "missing sprite" issues in my recent Parasite release. If you have characters that appear to have missing sprites, i.e. they disappear during moves where you don't expect them to be invisible, than this tool will help you catch them. Give it the path to the .sff and .air files, and it will chew through them both, and give you a list of all the sprites referenced in the .air file that don't exist in the .sff, along with the animation definition where the reference occurs, so you can easily go in with your text editor of choice and hand-edit the animation to remove or correct the offending lines. It took a few hours to write, but helped me solve Parasite's sprite problems in a matter of minutes instead of the hours of tedious searching it would have required otherwise.

MUGENFont

This is just a quick and dirty tool I wrote to build a MUGEN .fnt file, given the appropriately-formatted .pcx and text files. Honestly there are other tools that do this better (Font Editor, for example), but this one is mine so I thought I'd include it anyway.

Downloads

Eventually, I'll add a "tools" section to this site, or add a blurb for this on the Add-Ons page. For now, though, you can download all three of my MUGEN dev tools right here (download size: 40 kb).

(note that you may need to install the 1MB VB 6 runtimes, which you can get here, unless you already have them on your machine from another VB app. If the tools don't run when you extract them from the archive, install the runtime and try again)

Labels: 12 Days of Christmas, 12Days2009, tools