Command & Conquer Westwood Font Editor Released

[Plok 323]

Nyerguds, one of the community's most famed members and coders, has created the Westwood Font Editor, a tool which allows the editing of the official font files of various formats found in earlier Westwood games (Eye of the Beholder series, The Legend of Kyrandia series, Lands of Lore series, Dune II and 2000, Command & Conquer, Red Alert, Sole Survivor and Tiberian Sun, to name a few). This will allow easier development of fan-made localizations and modifications. You can download the latest version by following this link, the source code (written in C#, built on .NET Framework v3.5) is available as well. See this development thread for more information and full list of supported formats.

[Nyerguds 100]

Dune 2000 actually gave me the most trouble, lol. Since Westwood didn't make Dune 2000, It's a completely different format.

[Plok 323]

Still, the supported game list is impressive. Don't even know how you managed to support BattleTech: The Crescent Hawk's Revenge and DragonStrike, of all things, but it's quite awesome that you did.

 

Do you have plans to expand to RA2 to complete the 2D Westwood game list?

[Nyerguds 100]

No, for two reasons. One, there's apparently already an editor for the RA2 fonts, and two, these are all paletted formats; whether they're one-bit, four-bit or eight-bit, all actual values on the image refer to external colours. For that reason, the entire design of this editor was made for paletted images, and, in fact, the editable data of all these types is converted to 8 bit per pixel (meaning, 1 byte per pixel) internally.

 

I looked into the other fonts, but RA2 and Blade Runner, the other fonts up for consideration, both use non-paletted color formats, writing the color values directly to the image. All of the current architecture of the program is aimed at manipulating one-byte content relying on an external palette, so adding support for actual colour on the image data would mean a whole lot of extra work.

 

It could happen, though, but for high colour I'd have to write all new functions for changing the size of images and for shifting images up/down/left/right, not to mention the colour picker would need to be completely different, which is actually more annoying, since right now it's a single palette control programmed to seamlessly adapt to the amount of colours supported by the currently loaded font. There's no special exceptional code needed for any of the currently supported fonts at the moment; they can all use one generic system. For high-colour, that would no longer work.

 

As for BattleTech and the earlier games, blame Tomsons26's incessant nagging continuous research, lol. He kept digging up older files, and I got curious and looked into the formats. The fact those formats become increasingly simpler as you go further back in time just made me say "eh, why the heck not?"

[Nyerguds 100]

New version released: v1.3

 

I implemented pretty much everything that was still missing; custom palette support, and the ability to edit the program defaults of enabled options and editor colors.

 

I took the liberty of editing the topic to change the links

[Guest Stevie_K]

Nice job.

This is pretty cool.

[Nyerguds 100]

Thanks

[Nyerguds 100]

Released v1.4:

-Clipboard copy can now also be pasted as image in other applications.

-The correct symbol will be opened even when the grid columns are reordered.

-Added preview pane at the bottom.

-Opening an image by double-clicking in the dialog can no longer paint a pixel.

-The symbol image now refreshes correctly after a palette revert.

-Symbols in the grid are no longer centered but drawn at the correct position.

[Nyerguds 100]

Released v1.5:

-Implemented font type conversion.

-Added global color replace function.

-Ctrl + arrow keys serve as shortcuts for image shifting.

-Ctrl + Shift + arrow keys will shift all images in the font.

-The preview image can now be copied to the clipboard with a right-click menu.

-Images can now be pasted from the clipboard. They'll adapt to the currently loaded palette. A little test done by copying the editor's own icon:

 

[Mighty BOB! 5]

Well done, sir.