quote:Originally posted by Supreme Galactic Overlord

quote:Originally posted by Tradewarrior55

BTW Acid Draw is an ansi editor that is free:
http://download.com.com/3000-2192-10141 ... ag=lst-0-1

I went to that site downloaded it (again) extracted it, and clicked on the program icon, got a window saying AcidDraw.exe is not a valid windows application.

Sigh

Lets get together on ICQ and I think I can help you with your problems .. this post is getting longer then it needs to be.

Not sure if this is even relevant or if anyone even cares, but I'll throw it out there just in case. I don't know what problems some people are having with "TheDraw" but personally this is my editor of choice and will probably stay that way. I did my entire BBS with it back in the day and a lot of other things too.

There is absolutely no reason to believe you can't use this for TWGS ansi. I made welcome and menu ansi's with it that work flawlessly, and I've got two custom ships that display absolutely perfect in-game.

The *only* issue I've encountered is that when I save the ship ANSI's (the ones for general deployment at SD) it will add some kind of blank lines and then a few characters at the end of the last blank line. This causes the display to be munged, but if you open up the ansi with something simple like notepad and delete the empty lines / carriage returns and the goofy symbols/characters at the end and re-save it, it works fine in the game.

It could be that I'm just saving it without restricting the number of lines correctly, but rather than messing with getting that right, I've just gone with this quick and easy final tweak before I load them in game and like I said to shows up exactly like it's supposed to.

Again I see no reason why you can't use "TheDraw" because it's an outstanding ANSI editor in my opinion. Then again, to each his own and if you don't like TheDraw that's fine too. [:)]

quote:Originally posted by gatewaysysop


Again I see no reason why you can't use "TheDraw" because it's an outstanding ANSI editor in my opinion. Then again, to each his own and if you don't like TheDraw that's fine too. [:)]


You are absolutely right. The draw works great when you know how to use it (which I did not when I started posting in this thread). You are also right about the added lines and characters. The draw adds an odd header at the beginning that is about 3 or 4 characters in length, and I have to delete those. It also adds several blank lines at the end followed by a footer of 255D, the lines have to be deleted and the D has to be deleted. After that they look great in twars!

I've also found that The Brush, a companion software to the Draw is excellent, especially for transforming bitmaps to ANSI! If you take and gif, jpg or whatever, simplify the colors manually using some sort of editing program like Coral, then save it as a small enough bitmap (not too small), then load it with the Brush, you can make it perfectly suitable for The Draw as an ansi.

Just imparting what I've learned so far. I'm getting better and better at making these ansi files (thanks to a lot of help from Vid Kid who seems like a whiz on this subject).

Thanks to all for the help!