Open Source SHP Builder 4.0 is the next in line!
Apr 02, 2025 - 06:35
Hello again! And it is still April 1st in some places on Earth, so we can finalize our "Too Good to be True" with this announcement on schedule. It is about time to reveal our plans to conquer the world for all of you! You know? He who controls the past commands the future! The problem is when the past is really tough to control! And that is the case of OS SHP Builder and its horrible code. I have been working for over a month to reform the code and most of its structures, starting with the document itself (splitting it from SHP (TS) file format), UndoRedo, TempView, Session control, and several other components. The code I have here is quite different from 3.3x already, but it incorporates all its features, so don't worry about that.

We have goals for the upcoming OS SHP Builder 4.0.

  • In a very low term:

    • Auto-Save Session: You will be able to resume your work if the program closes unexpectedly.
    • Undo/Redo History Viewer: You will be able to view a Window with all your Undo/Redo history (and also see the recent ones on Undo and Redo buttons) and move to them if you feel like it.


  • In a medium-term:

    • Tertiary color selection in addition to Primary and Secondary colors.
    • Redesign of the Brush buttons: We will have the following set of tools available: Select, Magic Wand, Color Selector, Add Selection To Collection, Brush, Stamp, Shape, Fill, Replace Color, Transform. Each tool will have a set of options where you will be able to choose "Type, Shape, Size, Range/Scope and Color Options. Let's explain each of these things below

      • Select allows you to select a box, ellipse and other shapes in the image. Once selected, you can move these pixels in the image or copy and paste them elsewhere.
      • Magic Wand is a selection tool based on Flood and Fill.
      • Color Selection is one of the remaining things of OS SHP Builder 3.x, where you can select the color from a pixel.
      • Add Selection to Collection allows you to add the selected pixels as a new image in your collection, and you will be able to reuse it on Stamp for your upcoming sprites or even share it with the community, in a later time.
      • Brush allows you to paint shapes using the selected colors in the picture. You will be able to brush customized shapes using your first, secondary, and tertiary colors. You will also be able to brush using effects such as the ones you know in OS SHP Builder 3.x, such as Snow, Damage, etc.
      • Stamp works similarly as Brush, but your selected colors do not affect the shape you are using to paint. You can use it to place a Nod logo in your unit or use some of the likings of Dark Elf's Copy and Paste Pack in a very friendly way.
      • Shape allows you to create rectangles, ellipses, and other polygonal shapes.
      • Fill is the evolution of Flood and Flll with additional options.
      • Replace color allows you to replace colors on the current selection according to the options you choose.
      • Transform allows you to rotate, mirror, flip, erode, distort, among other transformations on selection.

    • And the options:

      • Type allows you to choose the variations of the tools.
      • Shape pops up a list of images or vectorized graphs to be used as the shape of your tool.
      • Size allows you to make your shape bigger or smaller.
      • Range/Scope allows you to limit the scope affected by the tool. It can be inside the current selection, at the current frame, all opened frames from the same SHP, new frame, new SHP, etc.
      • Color Options allows you to choose if the primary, secondary, or tertiary colors will affect your tool or not.


  • In a very long-term:

    • Generative AI support (requires an external tool, yet to be released):

      • AI will be able to generate new stamps, given a user prompt.
      • AI will be able to select parts of the picture, given a user prompt.
      • AI will be able to code and execute a chain of commands, as a modding assistant, given a user prompt. (You will be able to save this command if you like its effects).



Other than that, expect a faster and more stable tool with fewer memory leaks and well as surprises. I will continue supporting OS SHP Builder 3.3x while 4.0 has not been released. Right now, I am finishing reforming the whole code of the program making it support the new Document structure. Because this change affected almost every line, I am not being able to compile the current version of the program. So, I have no screenshots yet, sorry. The next step is to resume the Session saving.

Once we have a feature of the low-term list, I plan to make it public on the OS SHP Builder's SVN. If you have any suggestions and feedback, post it here!

Posted by Banshee
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PPM Community News Coverage will resume shortly!
Apr 02, 2025 - 05:32
Hello everyone! It is still the first day of April in places like Hawai, so, our "Too Good to be True" event continues! We have two announcements to do before it ends. One of them would be a release, but it will definitely not be possible to be a release, because the effort to release it has proven to demand too much effort. And despite all my efforts (I have been sleeping terribly these days), I couldn't finish it.

So, let's go to the announcement number 1!

And the announcement is.... from April 2nd on, we will resume our usual community news posting job.

It is something that I stopped doing back in January to focus all my efforts on the next announcement. But now I have no more deadline, I can work more calmly.


Now, you must be wondering what was the surprise that I am still working and I was supposed to deliver today, right? Check the next news post.... soon!

Posted by Banshee
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Open Source SHP Builder 3.38 Beta 29: It is in the grid!
Apr 02, 2025 - 05:14
Welcome back, Commander! And first of all, a big thanks to wow4ik81 for the feedback on the latest Open Source SHP Builder release. We have received reports that Show Grids was displaying an error. Even when it did not display an error, it had a weird behavior. But fear not! Reinforcements have arrived with Open Source SHP Builder 3.38 Beta 29, which makes the Show Grid feature work better than ever before!

For those unaware of what is being written here, Open Source SHP Builder is a pixel art editor dedicated to old Command & Conquer games, such as Tiberian Dawn, Red Alert 1, Tiberian Sun, Red Alert 2, and the modern OpenRA. It is free, and open-source. It allows you to edit any .SHP animations and graphics used by these games.  It provides a friendly user interface and its own set of features to help you create cameos, quickly,  replace colors (changing faction from units, for instance), create snow or crashed versions of buildings, import and export several kind of graphics taking into account singularities from all covered games, among many other features. Here is the official announcement that I have posted on Open Source SHP Builder's SVN about Open Source SHP Builder 3.38 Beta 29:

Quote:
This revision comes with a fully functional Show Grid for TS and RA2. It works better than in any other previous version because I have re-coded the whole thing from scratch in a much smarter way.




If you are curious about Open Source SHP Builder, visit the Official Website to obtain further information about it. Grab the latest version of Open Source SHP Builder by clicking Here. That's all, folks! Stay tuned at PPM for more news coverage on Open Source SHP Builder!

Posted by Banshee
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Open Source SHP Builder 3.38 Beta 28 is out! A late welcome to the 64 bits era!
Mar 31, 2025 - 21:50
Howdy everyone! Our beloved April 1st has started in China, Japan, Russia, Australia, and it begins with a big surprise:  a new version of Open Source SHP Builder called Open Source SHP Builder 3.38 Beta 28. For those unfamiliar with it, Open Source SHP Builder is a pixel art editor dedicated to old Command & Conquer games, such as Tiberian Dawn, Red Alert 1, Tiberian Sun, Red Alert 2, and the modern OpenRA. It is free, and open-source. It allows you to edit any .SHP animations and graphics used by these games.  It provides a friendly user interface and its own set of features to help you create cameos, quickly,  replace colors (changing faction from units, for instance), create snow or crashed versions of buildings, import and export several kind of graphics taking into account singularities from all covered games, among many other features. The changes from Open Source SHP Builder 3.38 Beta 28 were announced with the following words at the SVN:

Quote:
OS SHP Builder has finally reached the 64-bit era! We have revisited its code to support newer Delphi IDEs and 64 bits. With 64 bits, OS SHP Builder will be able to use more than 3GB of RAM, which allows you to use bigger zoom levels, load more images at once, among other things. The IDE change has also forced us to use different libraries for PNG and GIF support.


Do you believe in that? The last version of OS SHP Builder that brought a new feature was released over 1356 days ago... which is close to 4 years ago. So, it has been a while, isn't it? Now, the support for this beloved program resumes, and we will be fixing bugs as soon as our community reports it, preferentially in our forums.

The 64-bit conversion was not trivial. I had to edit a bunch of files and dive into several .asm codes to adapt them to 64 bits or convert them into comprehensive code. Assembly is not something that I handle well. It took time, but it was worth it, and hopefully, we will see more interesting features appearing in OS SHP Builder from now on!



For further information about Open Source SHP Builder, visit the Official Website. Download the latest version of Open Source SHP Builder Here. And this is all for today! Enjoy Open Source SHP Builder and provide your feedback about it so it can get better. I hope you enjoy it!

Posted by Banshee
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Too good to be true? That is our event in 9 days!
Mar 23, 2025 - 03:15
Hello everyone! You might have noticed that we are still silent in the news, but we have good reasons to do so. In Brazil, we have a saying that the year only starts after Carnival, so it was supposed to have started already, but there is a date on the web that is more important than Carnival. It starts on the very first second of the first day of the next month in Kiribati (Christmas Islands) GMT + 13 and ends at the very last second of the first day of the next month in Baker Island (-12 GMT).

It is a big day, and we have big plans for it. We still don't know exactly what we will end up doing on it, whether we will have releases or not, or at least an announcement that will give direction for this site for the next months. We are calling it "Too Good To Be True Event" without being sure that it will be good or not. The clock is ticking. Our progress so far is behind schedule. But even if we don't get everything we want online at that day, we may postpone some things, but not the event itself.

Posted by Banshee
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Happy 2025, from Project Perfect Mod Community!
Jan 04, 2025 - 13:55
Hello, ladies and gentlemen! At Project Perfect Mod, we wish a happy 2025 for all of you! We wish a healthy, peaceful, and resourceful year for every visitor. This last year was a tough one for this site due to server problems, and at the end of the year, I had some sort of burnout: I had to slow down, which is why I am posting this news a bit later than usual. But I am feeling better now with my energies renewed. I have a lot of work in progress in my backlog and I hope to end, at least something of them during this year.: OS BIG Editor code revamp (to support different package files in one and .mix file support), Voxel Section Editor III improvements (your recent request was not ignored G-E), several forum features (especially post reactions), some generative AI projects, among other things and.... my PhD project which I did not finish doing.


2024 for the PPM Community:


In the past year of 2024, I have worked much more to keep the existing things working other than finishing features. I particularly do not remember any forum feature that emerged this year, even behind the scenes. However, there was extensive work to fix the disaster caused by some changes in the PHP settings of the server. Even PPM SVN has gone offline at some point because of it.

Voxel Section Editor III has received 64-bit support and several user experience improvements, while OS .BIG Editor now supports .ZIP files and covers most if not all games from Petroglyph Games.


Future Plans for PPM Community:

This part of the news post will be repetitive toward the previous years because our plans did not change much. We still understand that the PPM community relies on user-created content to keep it fresh, alive, and kicking. The massive news creation allows me to contribute, but this is not enough. We need your posts, created assets, mods, feedback, doubts, etc. So, it is time to update our plans for the PPM Community for the next year and beyond with minor changes. Note that these items do not follow any priority order.


Content:

-> Improve the internal news creation tool to quickly allow the creation of other types of news posts: It would be fun if we had a weekly resume of the attractive SHP, Voxel, 3D, maps, etc. that were submitted in the forums. Also, we need to figure out means to facilitate the conversion of certain external news posts and to import news from Discord, which is quite complicated, to say the least.

-> Create more content for Project Perfect Game: PPG's content needs to cover the game engines that its news posts are covering. Right now, we only have a subset of the content of PPM on it, but the idea is that it will eventually grow into its own thing. We already have the infrastructure to do that. It also needs its own art, buttons, and a few things that will give its own identity.

-> Create Generative AI technologies: Use generative AI to create assets and allow users to generate assets with the restrictions of the games we cover in mind. We should add this kind of tool to Voxel Section Editor III, OS SHP Builder, and other tools.

-> Context-based post content: We plan to add a BB code to allow parts of a forum post to be visible only on forums or only on PPM, PPG, RA2 PPM, TS PPM, or C&C PPM.... or a mix of them. With the creation of the PPM subsites and PPG, we are in dire need of this feature. I'm still trying to figure out the best way to do that without compromising our RSS feeds.


Forums:

-> Re-plan the use of the forum keywords by the users: Right now, when you create a post, you have the option to write some keywords for it. They will only show up if a moderator/admin approves it. But this is definitely a terrible way to use it because keywords will only be useful if they follow some standards. And this is a task for those who organize the forums. So, our idea is to have a fixed set of keywords in each forum that should be allowed to be used, which should affect its organization. I.e., If you want to report a bug from a project, you could highlight the "#Bug" keyword in your topic. If a moderator of the forum eventually fixes your reported bug, it could add a #Fixed to your topic or any other keyword that fits. Then, you could view all topics with #Bug in the forum if you hit the highlighted word at the top of the forum view. Things like that could also be helpful in reducing the number of forums here. Let's say you have a mod. Instead of having a forum for each faction, you could replace it with the use of keywords #GDI, #Nod, #Forgotten, etc. The possibilities are countless.

-> Modernize the forums' user interface: We want to make it become more friendly to browse it with mobile devices. Also, we want to allow posting, editing, and other common tasks to be faster and as comfortable as a chat in Discord. We also plan to bring friendly URLs, HTML5 support, etc...

-> Add reactions to forum posts like what you have in the most modern chat programs.

-> Add multiple participants for Private Messages, transform it into a conversation, and Report this Post to a Moderator: Right now, you can only PM a single person, and this is quite unattractive when you have Discord, Whatsapp and so many other better messaging options. A Report this Post to a Moderator feature requires PMs to multiple participants. Otherwise, the best thing we can do is Report this Post to Banshee. We also need a better mechanism to warn when a PM receives a response.

-> Allow users to create communities in PPM forums that are detached from PPM's forum organization: We want to eventually allow any forum user to create forums without my interference. However, these forums would not show up on the ppmforums.com index, although they would still be publicly accessible if desired by the owner of the community. So, if you have a project, instead of requesting hosting here, you would simply create a forum for it. If it is good enough, we will promote it in our index. Otherwise, it would be ok. Of course it is something that our current infrastructure is not ready to run, and when it becomes available, it would also require a lot of attention in terms of content, security issues, and bugs. This is a long-term plan.


PPM and Subsites:

-> Modernize the sites and subsites: While most of our plans for site and subsites modernization have been implemented, there is one thing left: The ability to show news as we scroll and have each news with a friendly URL that the search engines can crawl.


Modding Tools:

-> Progress with my doctorate project to transform low poly pixel art into highly detailed images: The scope of my Ds.C. thesis is broader than that, but a super-sampling application of it would help us to convert our SHP files into something that could be used in other games and projects.

-> Add Python support: Make sure the existing community tools support Python to extend their functionalities with AI and plugins.

-> Add plugin support: Make sure the existing community tools support external command line tools to extend their functionalities.

-> Progress with VXLSE III's 3D model export feature: This is important if we plan to become a community that modifies or develops 3D games. We have many voxel assets that would be very useful in newer games if we are able to convert them. Don't expect this to be finished at any time soon since I have a doctorate to finish first, and my thesis will be used on this solution (being a small but significant part of it). VXLSE III could also receive a different interface to allow the user to model voxel models in a similar fashion that is done with CAD modelers.

-> Allow OS .BIG Editor to load multiples types of packages in one, receive third-party plugin support, CLI support, API support, etc.


And that's all for now. I hope you have a great 2025 and my PHP let us progress this time!

Posted by Banshee
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OpenRA's latest Playtest 20241228 has been released for the new year!
Jan 01, 2025 - 04:40
One vision, one purpose! OpenRA has been recently improved with the release of OpenRA Playtest 20241228. For those who are not acquainted with it, OpenRA is a real-time strategy game engine that recreates the gameplay experience of Command & Conquer games. OpenRA is packaged with three mods: Dune, Tiberian Dawn, and Red Alert 1, which expands and improves the experience of the original games based on the development team's ideals. OpenRA works for Windows, Linux, macOS, and FreeBSD. Here are the official words about OpenRA Playtest 20241228:

Quote:
Just in time for the New Year, we are releasing Playtest 20241228 with several important fixes and minor features:


Notable changes include:

  • Saboteurs can now cloak while moving
  • added delete area button to the map editor
  • improved Battlefield News dropdown
  • improved formatting of unit descriptions and encyclopedias
  • fixed Dune 2000 not detecting installed music and videos
  • fixed harvesters not always acting correctly with queued orders
  • fixed a bug where the game window could glitch out on Windows 10
  • fixed several crashes
  • and fixed a few other minor bugs


   And, of course, the Tiberian Dawn HD playtest can be downloaded here.



OpenRA Playtest 20241228 is a bug fix of the real monster that was released a month earlier, which was OpenRA Playtest 20241116. That one was built to shake the foundations of OpenRA. Here's their announcement back in November:

 
Quote:
Welcome back, Commanders!


After a whole year of development, the OpenRA team proudly presents Playtest 20241116. This latest installment elevates your OpenRA experience with enhanced visuals, new tools, and improved performance across the board.



 


 OpenRA now supports post-processing effects out of the box!


Introducing the newly revamped Map Editor, which is designed with a modern interface and a cohesive design. We took notice of how players use the editor and reimagined it to better align with your creative needs.



 
 New Map Editor!


New Map Editor features include:

  • draggable selections
  • draggable actors
  • measurement tools
  • a marker layer
  • a play button
  • and more!


We added an encyclopedia to the Tiberian Dawn mod! This feature was inspired by the community’s desire for an in-game resource to consolidate knowledge about units, structures, and technologies. While fan-made wikis have been invaluable, many have become outdated or inconsistent as the game evolves.



 
 New EVA Database!


This latest release has significantly improved support for HD art assets. You should notice faster load times and overall performance improvements for the “Tiberian Dawn HD” project. It is packaged as a separate release and can be downloaded here. This preview is multiplayer-compatible with the main 20241116 playtest. The C&C Remastered Collection must be installed through Steam or the EA App, and if using macOS or Linux, the project README provides detailed installation instructions.


Other notable changes include:

  • game assets can now be installed from the Steam release of The Ultimate Collection
  • switched to high-quality Dune 2000 assets and included lots of extra visual polish
  • added two Red Alert missions and improved the quality of many others
  • Red Alert and Dune 2000 balance changes
  • skirmish options no longer reset between matches
  • behind the scenes, we made significant progress towards supporting additional languages in future releases.


As always, the full changelog is available on GitHub if you would like to find out more.


We hope you’ll enjoy this newest installment of OpenRA! Good luck on the battlefield, Commanders!


If you are curious about OpenRA, visit the Official Website, Forums, ModDB Profile, Discord Channel, and YouTube Video Channel to obtain further information about it. Grab the latest version of OpenRA by clicking Here. And that's all for now! Have fun and enjoy OpenRA!

Posted by Banshee
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Vengi 0.0.34, available for download!
Dec 06, 2024 - 13:48
Howdy! It is time to catch up on some old news, as reinforcements arrived a couple of weeks ago from Vengi as Vengi 0.0.34 has been published by mgerhardy. For those unaware of what is being written here, Vengi is a voxel engine that contains the VoxEdit, which is a voxel art editor that supports several volumetric pixel file formats, such as Command & Conquer vxl, Minecraft, Quake 1 bsp, Ace of Spades vxl, as well as some other voxel editors such as Goxel and MagicaVoxel. Here is the official announcement from VoxEdit's staff about Vengi 0.0.34:

Quote:
Changelog

A more detailed changelog can be found on github.

Join our discord server.

See the documentation for further details.

Known issues.

0.0.34 (2024-XX-XX)

General:

  • Fixed invalid UV coordinate handling when importing meshes to voxelize them
  • Added support for paint.net palettes
  • Added support for Adobe Photoshop ACO palettes
  • Added support for bbmodel Blockbench format
  • Added support for vxb Sandbox Block format
  • Fixed a few errors in the lua bindings of the g_import global
  • Extended the lua api (g_sys, g_io)
  • Fixed nameless, embedded textures in glb
  • Fixed off-by-one in voxformat_voxelizemode 1
  • Fixed missing axis flip for md2 scale and translate value imports
  • Added support for Quake1 mdl files
  • Added support for exporting and importing to and from png slices
  • Added support for Autodesk 3ds files
  • Support for loading normals for voxelization (mesh formats) and for voxel formats (vxl)
  • Fixed vxl saving for negative coordinates
  • Split file dialog options into a new separated dialog
  • Added new lua scripts (game of life, mandelbulb, smooth)
  • Added support for Pixelorama palette

VoxConvert:

  • Removed --image-as-XXX parameters (now part of the png format)
  • Removed --colored-heightmap (this is auto-detected in the png format now)

VoxEdit:

  • Allow to change the local directory for the asset panel
  • Add more online sources to the asset panel
  • Added support to apply a checkboard pattern to your voxels just for rendering
  • Improved handling for max allowed voxels
  • Disable undo/redo for model changes if you exceed a max suggested model size
  • Disable autosaves for model changes if you exceed a max suggested model size
  • New brush type to project textures into sub areas or on surfaces
  • Added an FPS option for the animation timeline
  • Added normal palette panel
  • Fixed missing memento group for merging nodes
  • Improved undo/redo for lua script changes on the scenegraph
  • Added a slice mode to only show a particular height level of your volume
  • Don't place invalid colored voxels in group lock mode
  • Render forward direction in the viewport


You can check more information about VoxEdit by visiting the Topic at PPM Forums, Official Website, and Discord Channel. Download Vengi 0.0.34 Here. And that's all for now! Have fun and enjoy VoxEdit and Vengi!

Posted by Banshee
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