VDC v1.5

[Dragon5]

According to the screenshot, you haven't selected a frame. Press down when you focus on the frame viewer, or select a frame by clicking inside it.

Edit: Second observation: Sometimes I don't think the sprite files load properly. I don't know why it says "select a frame" when I noticed you have a frame selected already. All I can say is double check that the files are in the location you assigned them in the program and reload the file.

[YinYin]

Hmm
there should be an error message of some kind if the bitmap wasn't present.

Also why doesn't the frame viewer display the selected frame? That seems to be the real problem.
Can you update/change bdy/itr areas and have that show up in the viewer while it just says "select a frame"?

[NightmareX1337]

Wow... It looks like everyone is creating their own data changer
LF Studio tries to provide a lot of feature and heavy tools but it even takes time to startup, it's not performance wise and crashes too often
Jiquera's DCer is focused on "keep it simple" way
Someone else's DCer has a nice real time data changing feature and that makes a significant difference
I'm trying to make a fast, bug-free and featureful DCer (and it's still under active development)

Now I wonder what's the idiom you are following and I'm sure you have a reason for making it, I'm just curious, lighten up my mind with your wisdom !

[YinYin]

They all got their niche ;)

I'm not looking to make something really featureful. Actually already pretty happy with what it currently is.
My goal is just to have something that is close to Jiquera's with size/speed/simplicity - except adding all the visual elements that speed up my own work flow (which is why I have priority on create/delete elements in the frame viewer rather than bloat features like templates/syntax warnings,suggestions/animations/etc - once I do expand this).

edit: the largest issue is that featureful and fast/bug-free are pretty opposing forces, especially when you are working alone and with "little" experience -- so I'm obviously opting for fast/bug-free rather than featureful - at all times

[NightmareX1337]

I see...
I don't really think featureful and (bug free + fast) are opposite but there are some technical difficulties about it: somehow people seem completely uninterested about LF2 IDE; no one gives feedback, no one report bugs and I have to figure out the whole thing myself I sometimes get surprised when I encounter some critical bug and that was there for a while. This probably means one of these:
-No one actually uses it I'm just fooling myself
-People are too lazy to write and tell something about it
-I fixed a non-existing bug

Anyways, it was a really satisfactory when I saw that green line in GitHub: %100 C# yay !
Would you accept if I contribute to your project? It seems like you're doing things not the proper .Net way and there are some seriously weird designs in that code (Main and EncryptByte function in EncryptText class ??? Just why? You could simply use this working algorithm )

[YinYin]

I see...
I don't really think featureful and (bug free + fast) are opposite but there are some technical difficulties about it: somehow people seem completely uninterested about LF2 IDE; no one gives feedback, no one report bugs and I have to figure out the whole thing myself I sometimes get surprised when I encounter some critical bug and that was there for a while. This probably means one of these:
-No one actually uses it I'm just fooling myself
-People are too lazy to write and tell something about it
-I fixed a non-existing bug :D

I'm sure you know about errors/lines of code. Of course you may achieve stable/fast and lots of features, but project sizes can blow up trouble exponentially - possibly even damaging the core function (not just in programming). And even if it's a huge beautiful flawless thing, if the user doesn't know how to use it it fails all the same. Just imagine giving a swiss army knife to a prehistoric human - might not even figure out how to cut anything with it before it breaks, while a sharp stone works just the same for simply cutting things. (not saying people/users are dumb - I'm sure you would have trouble surviving compared to a prehistoric human - call it environmental smarts).

I'm mostly not using the larger/more complex data changers because they are usually slow/unstable from the first time I launch them. Once they manage to start up I notice that the 10% of features I really need (and by that I mean frequently and quickly) are scattered among 90% of things I will likely never use beyond giving them a try once. So even if stability is achieved I still have to snipe the features crucial for me in a pile of other stuff constantly. Now if just one of the crucial things has a slower work flow than using a pure text editor and half of the other things I tried didn't work the way I expected I have no drive to go bug hunting (and considering the size of the tool also no hope of it getting where I would need it).
So that's why I commonly only drop short bug reports about a program not running at all/crashing and even once that is fixed don't go back to using it - though in case of a killer feature like real time data changing I do pester SomeoneElse for a bit till I can use it again :)
(Leo's bullet storm would have taken forever to setup without that - but I still can't work with it all the time for that's not a thing I need all the time and it has nothing else I need)

So yeah, overall I would be surprised if anyone used the larger tools to their full extend.
I think a tool can only grow that large/complex without suffering from overwhelming feature bloat if the features are introduced slowly by demand and only stay in when tested and confirmed to be an improvement to work flow (in which case there also are people who can teach new users about how to best use things).
Just one example: Jiquera's has bookmarks - they may be cool in theory but ... find me 3 people who use them regularly. Multiply the amount of features like that by 10 and you may drown out everything actually useful.

Anyways, it was a really satisfactory when I saw that green line in GitHub: %100 C# yay :D !
Would you accept if I contribute to your project? It seems like you're doing things not the proper .Net way and there are some seriously weird designs in that code (Main and EncryptByte function in EncryptText class ??? Just why? You could simply use this working algorithm ;) )

Feel free to make a clean code fork. If that ends up running the same while being easier to continue development I shall merge that back into the main (I'm still new to all this) and I wouldn't mind getting help on my future planned features :D (there should already be a hidden photoshop-layers-like panel for managing frame elements - I'm much stronger on knowing/figuring out how the interface should behave than actually creating it :'/ ). This is all mushy code because I never learned anything properly apart from a single semester programming basics with focus on java (though I could already program the same ugly stuff before that and probably forgot half of the best practises I learned there).

I wanted to go with this as it's shorter/simpler: http://www.lf-empire.de/forum/showthread...#pid195860

[Dragon5]

On the subject of Data Changers and their features...
I've actually been using two data changers while working with LF2. I use Someone Else's WTE because I often make changes and restarting LF2 becomes a chore for me. VDC has been really helpful for bdy and itr frames (which I didn't look in much detail prior). Simply pasting any modifications from VDC to WTE really makes things a breeze.
VDC is definitely faster though after comparing the replace function between them using a heavy request of replacing " " with " ". VDC was pretty much instantaneous while WTE took about 30 seconds to scroll through each instance.

[NightmareX1337]

I corrected horribly performing DCing algorithm it was taking seconds to open a file which is not acceptable and here is the pull request I created: pull #1

Reason why it performs horrible (Click to View)

CSHARP-Code:    public class DecryptFile    {        public static string Main(String FileName)        {            string text = "";            FileStream finp = new FileStream(FileName, FileMode.Open);            int counta = 0;            int b;            finp.Seek(123, SeekOrigin.Begin);            while ((b = finp.ReadByte()) != -1)            {                text += (char)DecryptByte(counta, (byte)b);                counta++;                if (counta > 36)                    counta = 0;            }            finp.Close();            return text;        }          public static byte DecryptByte(int counta, byte b)        {            String plainEncryptionKey = "odBearBecauseHeIsVeryGoodSiuHungIsAGo";            b -= (byte)plainEncryptionKey[counta];            return b;        }    }

First, unlike in C++ strings are immutable in C#. It's a good thing but people often misuse it. Every time on a string operation such as concatenation, a brand new string is created and the old data is copied to that new buffer and result is returned by String.Concat() function. To be exact, compiler simply replaces all str1 + str2 code to String.Concat(str1, str2). Look at this code:

CSHARP-Code: text += (char)DecryptByte(counta, (byte)b);

Not only it calls a function to decrypt every single byte but more importantly it cause a logarithmic performing code according to the file size by creating a new string for each byte for the file. If you really want to do a similar coding than there is a StringBuilder class for that purpose just replace += with .Append() and you're fine :)

I think it's time for VDC v1.5 :D

[Rhino.Freak]

Hmm
there should be an error message of some kind if the bitmap wasn't present.

Also why doesn't the frame viewer display the selected frame? That seems to be the real problem.
Can you update/change bdy/itr areas and have that show up in the viewer while it just says "select a frame"?

I can indeed change those.. the frame number appears above as well maybe I just screenshotted in the wrong time.
I'll try to report if I can see the sprite in game.

EDIT: so the sprite doesn't appear in game as well. lol. Why can't I see the issue? Anyone?

[YinYin]

v1.5
An even smaller update: just a huge improvement in decryption speed as suggested by Nightmarex1337

Reason why it performs horrible (Click to View)

Code:

   public class DecryptFile
   {
       public static string Main(String FileName)
       {
           string text = "";
           FileStream finp = new FileStream(FileName, FileMode.Open);
           int counta = 0;
           int b;
           finp.Seek(123, SeekOrigin.Begin);
           while ((b = finp.ReadByte()) != -1)
           {
               text += (char)DecryptByte(counta, (byte)b);
               counta++;
               if (counta > 36)
                   counta = 0;
           }
           finp.Close();
           return text;
       }

       public static byte DecryptByte(int counta, byte b)
       {
           String plainEncryptionKey = "odBearBecauseHeIsVeryGoodSiuHungIsAGo";
           b -= (byte)plainEncryptionKey[counta];
           return b;
       }
   }

First, unlike in C++ strings are immutable in C#. It's a good thing but people often misuse it. Every time on a string operation such as concatenation, a brand new string is created and the old data is copied to that new buffer and result is returned by String.Concat() function. To be exact, compiler simply replaces all str1 + str2 code to String.Concat(str1, str2). Look at this code:

Code:

text += (char)DecryptByte(counta, (byte)b);

Not only it calls a function to decrypt every single byte but more importantly it cause a logarithmic performing code according to the file size by creating a new string for each byte for the file. If you really want to do a similar coding than there is a StringBuilder class for that purpose just replace += with .Append() and you're fine :)

That will be crazy useful for anything I do.
So, I did some performance testing.
The current decryption takes ~500ms for me.
Dia6los takes ~10ms.
Yours takes ~1ms.
But if I use a StringBuilder with Append() on the current one instead of += I can bring it down from ~500ms to ~3ms.

Anything below 200ms is already fine by me and I'd like to avoid possibly using unsafe solutions by accident - as I often don't know what the hell I'm doing.

Also the program currently starts in the unreasonable nostalgic exact same dimensions as Jiquera's - starting maximised would be a pain for myself on a big screen (filling half of it with nothing). Is anyone here working on low resolution that starting maximised would actually make sense?


edit: @Rhino.Freak: well that sounds like you have a problem with your bitmap header.
Provide us the bitmap - maybe it has a weird compression that prevents it from showing up.
actually what about trying a shorter frame name - wouldn't know why that could be a problem in my program, but I know LF2 can be iffy about it.