Purpose of the app is to help with exporting sprite sheets from Heroes of Might and Magic 3 HD assets. The tool can load image data and sprite information from Homm3 HD .pak and .lod files as well, and allows the user to adjust the individual frames before exporting a sprite sheet that could be loaded in Stream Avatars.
The program can be downloaded from here (H3HDSpriteGen_xyz.zip): https://github.com/zomle/homm3hdsprite/releases
The program requires no installation whatsoever, it can be extracted and started, as long as the prerequisites are met.
The program uses .NET 5.0 and WPF, so the .NET 5.0 Runtime is required: .NET 5.0 Runtime Installer.
After starting the program, load the Homm3 HD asset files found in the data subdirectory:
Select the creature you want to export:
All the available animations for the selected creature and their individual frames can be reviewed:
The program uses sprite information extracted from the homm3 asset to adjust the frames, but it's usually not pixel perfect. In some cases it's completely off, so usually some manual adjustment is needed. Each frame can be individually adjusted by 1 or 5 pixels at a time. It's possible the pause/resume the animation preview and step through the frames manually for easier adjustment:
It's also possible to adjust the scaling of the image, so the spritesheet fits a certain size. The frame that will be used in the sprite sheet can be also increased or decreased. If part of the image crosses the frame border, it will be cut off during sprite sheet export:
For easier adjustment, a helper center line can be enabled. This won't be included in the export, it's only there to help with the adjustment. The background of the frame can be changed, in some cases it's easier to see the animation in front of a dark or light color:
The Stream Avatars(SA) avatars have 5 mandatory actions (idle, run, sit, stand, jump), and some optional, out of which we are interested in one (attack). The tool automatically assigns the HOMM3 animations to the SA actions, and allows each actions to be previewed.
Even though the animations might look fine on their own, they might be misaligned compared to each other. It's possible to adjust the whole animation (all frames) at the same time, so when you toggle through idle/run/sit/etc. the animations look aligned.
It's possible to assign any HOMM3 animation to any SA action:
Frame size can also be adjusted here:
After the animations are properly aligned, the tool can try to determine the minimum frame size that would fit all frames. It usually works, but in case of some images it doesn't, in which case manual frame size adjustment is suggested.
When the animations and frames are aligned, the frame size is set up, the sprite sheet can be exported. The exported sprite sheet will not contain the dashed center line, or a background for the frames (it will be transparent):
Along with the sprite sheet, a text file will also be exported, which contains information regarding the generated sprite sheet, so if necessary it can be reproduced later, or the information can be used when importing it to Stream Avatars:
Suggestions:
- It's unnecessary to adjust all HOMM3 animations. After loading a creature, assign the correct HOMM3 animation sequences to the Stream Avatars actions and fix only those 6 animations that are actually used.
- There is a memory leak somewhere, that causes the program to start using a lot of memory after loading several creatures. Sometimes it's a good idea to restart the tool.
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Error handling. A lot of errors are dealt with, but it can be crashed by opening invalid .lod/.pak files for examples. Also testing was not extensive by any means, so there might be circumstances that causes crashes. "Normal" usage should work fine.
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Memory leak. Loading the animations involve loading several large (but downscaled) images, and displaying them causes seemingly unnecessarily large memory usage. The memory used should be freed up when another creature is loaded, but after some testing I suspect WPF caches images even after they are not needed, which causes a memory leak. Restarting the tool when the memory usage is too big fixes the issue, so I haven't spent more time trying to fix this.
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Layout issues on small resolution. Some parts of the UI look misaligned in very small resolution.
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This is a hobby project of mine, and as such I have limited time to work on it, hence the reason why it's made open-source. Feel free to report issues, suggest features, create pull requests, etc. I'll try to deal with everything in a timely manner :)
- I used Visual Studio 2019 Community Edition for development and WPF on .NET 5.0.
- I haven't tested it on other versions, but might work fine.
- zomle - Initial work - https://github.com/zomle
This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE.md file for details.
- Thanks specialiste for the inspiration.