Easy-Decal Project Approved!

[athomas]

The following project has been approved:

Project: Easy-Decal

Counter-Strike is the #1 online action game in the world.
(http://www.counter-strike.net/)

In Counter-Strike, Half-Life and many other games based on the Half-Life engine, each player has a decal or “spray” which they can spraypaint onto walls and floors to mark their territory. It’s possible to create custom decals and install them into a game, but the existing tools to do this require users to provide an image that meets the requirements of the game engine regarding the dimensions, colour depth and format of the image. This makes creating a decal a very difficult task for anyone not familiar with image manipulation programs and even for some who are.

Easy Decal solves this by allowing users to create a decal from ANY image that Java can read, which means GIF, JPG, PNG and BMP (if Java 5 is installed). Easy Decal automatically resizes the image and quantizes its colour palette before writing out a decal file in the format required by the game engine. Creating a decal becomes as easy as dropping an image onto a desktop icon. Future versions of Easy Decal will even give users the option of automatically installing the decal into the game.

While quite small and simple, I hope this program will have the following consequences:

1. Expose many people who don’t already use Java to get it on their desktop and be using it for something useful that no native program currently does.

2. Be the start of a progression where we have top quality game-related and game-programming tools for games that are NOT written in Java. This will expose many non-Java developers and game creators to the possibilities of Java and hence improve its credibility among that community. Hopefully this will eventually lead to people realising that it can also be great for actual game engines as well.

For more information, see:

http://easy-decal.dev.java.net

[grlea]

Hi all.

I’m the developer of Easy Decal.
I just wanted to point out quickly that it’s not a “pipe dream” project.
The first stage of the application (batch decal creation) is written and working.
Myself and a few friends are using it with much satisfaction.

Also, the website is all pretty (even has a logo!), contains downloadable working releases and is ready to be seen by the public as soon as Athomas hits the ‘approve’ button.

The next major tasks on Easy Decal are:

1. Internationalise (/Internationalize! :)) the batch processing tool.
2. Develop a GUI (over the same codebase) for decal creation.
3. Add functionality for decal installation.
4. Internationalise the GUI.

I’m of course happy to answer any questions people have about the project.

Please vote!