uGrab

© 2019-2020 K1n9_Duk3

Description:

This program is an advanced EGAGRAPH editor with a graphical user interface, mainly intended for use with Commander Keen source mods.

I wrote this tool because the existing tools to edit EGAGRAPH files (like ModKeen and ModId) were not designed to allow the user to add, move or remove sprites. This was fine for modding Keen 4-6, since the amount of sprites is hard-coded in those games and you couldn't add more sprites anyway. But for source mod development, this is a crippling disadvantage. After adding a couple of new sprites for the Foray in the Forest source mod and having to rewrite half of the ModId definition file for that game every single time, I decided to write this tool as a ModId replacement.

This is a Windows program (Win32).

Features:

uGrab can:

• read and write EGAGRAPH files
• import graphics in any format, including BMP, PNG, GIF and JPEG
• export graphics as fully ModId-compatible bitmaps
• add new elements (fonts, sprites, pics, externs) and move them to any position without having to rename files
• edit sprite hitboxes by pointing and clicking instead of typing numbers into a text file
• add new elements by dragging and dropping files onto the uGrab window while the program is running
• automatically remove any unnecessary transparent parts from sprites and adjust the offset values accordingly to reduce memory usage in-game

Warning:

Earlier versions of ModId (and perhaps ModKeen and others as well) have a bug that may corrupt the bitmap graphics upon export. The hitbox visualization in the exported bitmap is not clipped to the hitbox part of the bitmap and therefore may overwrite parts of the sprite image when exported. This was not an issue with the original sprites, but sprites that have been optimized by uGrab may not be exported correctly by these tools.

The bug has already been fixed in the ModId source, but at the time of writing this, no updated build is available for Windows. If you need to, you can also run uGrab from the command line as a ModId replacement. Although uGrab is not 100% compatible with all the features that ModId has, at least it won't export corrupted bitmaps.

Download:

Screenshots:

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