This week I've been on a bit of a tangent: as I've had to enter the wonderful world that is MFC (Life without it was so good!). Below is a small application that will take a set of images and combine them into one. Useful if one has a lot of frames of animation that belong in a single texture.

Given a set of images, the combiner will try and pack them into as small an area as possible optionally forcing the output texture to have a width and height that are a power of two.


Eventually this app must be integrated into the main editor but for the time being it's a quick and dirty solution to an immediate problem. The ability to read PNGs is added by the awesome libpng library and implicitly by the zlib library - thanks guys!

Image combiners aside what I hope too achieve this weekend is Ruby integration. Unfortunately this a fairly large task: not because Ruby is hard to integrate, but because my world libraries are missing a layer of abstraction - I don't want Ruby talking directly to graphics instances.

The scene library - which should provide this abstraction - currently consists of a two files. Writing behaviour into this could easily take a couple of days so it's unlikely that I'll actually see Ruby doing anything this weekend... but here's hoping. As an aside: confusingy the scene library is a higher level library than the world library but the world library is too deeply entrenched to rename now... Oh well.

Later!