Re: [GD-General] Level Editing

[Mickael P. <mpo...@ed...>]

>> Or indeed, any other tools that people
>> are writing plug-ins for.
>
> I guess it doesn't count, but after the recent Photoshop 7's braindead
> monkeying around with TGA's alpha channel (and their terribly
> unhelpful developer relations - almost worse than not having one at
> all, their standard response to any question is "you are wrong"), I
> decided to write a Photoshop plugin myself, either a transparency
> filter or a TGA file format. Simple thing...
>
> I was horrified at what I saw after installing the SDK. What a
> terrible mess. Projects linked to sourcesafe databases, wrong file
> headers included on PC, samples that Just Don't Work... 3DS4 IPAS
> programming seemed like a blessing in comparison. I mean, it _can_ be
> done, but it was not going to be the couple-hour hack such a simple
> thing should have been. In the end I talked with my lead artist and
> we figured out a Photoshop action to help us with the whole alpha /
> transparency mess. They're sticking with Photoshop 6 as well, Adobe's
> not getting upgrade money from us this year.
>
> Sorry I had to get out of my chest. :)

I can understand it.

Last year I needed to make a small plugg'in for PhotoShop (or PaintShopPro,
this does not matter) that could perform a simple filtering action on a
picture currently loaded, and I made the same constatation. Compared to MAX
SDK, the adobe is SDK is _crap_. The documentation is bad, most of the code
of the samples is about endianness problems that can arise when you want to
make a pluggin that work on Mac versions of PhotoShop, the examples
themselves are just examples not tied to the real world. In Max SDK at least
you have a DXF export plugging that can be used for real. In PS SDK, all you
have is a "simple format" export that of course does not handle half of the
quarter of the things you have to consider when you have to create a pluggin
for this program.

And of course, I was totaly unable to find any tutorial, clear explanation,
or source sample on the web :(

    Mickael Pointier