It won't be able to extract perfect images for needle and glass?
It will provide something that can be used as a starting point, but it will require some image editing capabilities to create something useful from them.
Pretty much.
So I am honestly wondering, will this tool actually be making things easier, or allow for getting better results compared to using screenshots, Photoshop and VUeditor?
I think the only real benefit is it makes it easy to get the background and LED images. It will be able to get the needle where no glass was used. Personally I think exporting all the frames is pretty nuts but someone on Hydrogen asked for it so I figure if that's what they want to do it's up the them.
Would it be an idea to split posts about this BinExtractor into a new and separate topic?
Maybe. I really don't want to spend any more time on it because of the reasons above.
I was floating around with the idea today of allowing the user to select a pixel in the background image and entering a new colour where it would replace the colour of all the pixels with the same colour as the selected pixel. Effectively allowing the user to change some colours on the skin while it's still packaged as a bin file.
But the pixel RGB values would have to match exactly. I can't see it being that useful except for skins that have a uniform colour. Any kind of gradients would just result in a mess. It would only work for the background image, not the LED or needle.
But I think I'll drop the idea, it's a lot of work and will probably end up creating a half arsed meter with blotchy colours. I also had nothing but trouble today trying to recompress the bin file. I did manage to automate combining meters that use separate files eg) foobarskin1.bin, foobarskin2.bin into a single bin file but only if it was uncompressed. It's a pointless endeavour really as it has zero effect on how the skin operates.
Here is the stupid crap I had to deal with today-
Compress the file with the compression library using LZMA - The compression library couldn't open it and neither could 7-zip. I doesn't save the required header details and I had no luck manually trying to generate them.
Compress the file with the compression library using BZIP2 - The file could be opened with the compression library but compressing it took over 2 minutes.
Compress the file with 7-zip using LZMA- The compression library couldn't open it. The header 7-zip creates is different to VUEditor.
Compress the file with 7-zip using BZIP2 - The file could be opened with the compression library and only took a few seconds to zip. But as reported previously, the compression library is slow as balls opening Bzip files.
And that's me done for the day.
