Staff

The staff to conquer the dunge

The CLI-tool for working with graphical objects such as meshes, animations (actions), character skeletons, sprites, etc. I use it to convert models from Blender into a usable way to work with it in my graphics library dunge, as well to work with sprites.

At the moment, this tool is exclusively for personal use, it is unlikely that you will need it.

Build and install

The most convenient way to do everything at once:

cargo install --locked --git https://github.com/nanoqsh/staff.git

You can then call the tool directly:

staff

Conversions

Export an object from Blender in collada .dae format. In order for the object to have the correct orientation in dunge, apply global orientation:

• X for the forward axis.
• Y for the up axis.

For example, I want to save a mesh in model.dae file.

staff convert mesh model.dae

If everything went well, it will write a .json file to the working directory. Use the -o or --outdir flag to specify exactly where you want to save files.

Sprites repainting

It would be cool to be able to recolor sprites in a desired palette. First you need to collect the palette itself. To do this, specify a .png image with specific colors:

staff collect palette.png

It collect all unique colors and save them to a file. Then, you can recolor the image using this palette. It take the palette.json file by default, but you can specify a specific palette file with the following argument:

staff repaint sprite.png palette.json

Create a sprite atlas

To create the atlas, you need to specify all the sprites that need to be glued together. For example, let's take all images from the sprites directory:

staff atlas sprites/*.png

This will create two files: atlas.png for the final image and atlas.json for the sprite map. The sprite map describes all entries by four values: x position, y position, width and height. The sprites names are taken from their file names. To set your own names, you can describe a .json file for name conversion, it looks like this:

{
    "colon": ":",
    "dot": ".",
    "dquote": "\"",
    "squote": "'",
    "slash": "/",
    "star": "*"
}

To use the transformation, specify this file:

staff atlas sprites/*.png --names names.json

Specifying the file is optional, otherwise it will default to names.json file.

A detailed description of all parameters can be obtained from the help:

staff atlas --help