Automation for theater builders

[crossup]

Being an expert at being lazy and faced with the task of placing tens of thousands of tiles to complete Hawaii, my slippery mind had found some excellent short cuts to mindless repetious keyboard entry, endless clicking.
First get this software,also available at ZDNET as a 90 day trial. http://www.kratronic.com/recorder/
This will allow you to record virtually ANY action, edit and create them.
An example: I have a RAW to BMP converter, the only one that does a particular format, and it requires you click " ACCEPT" for EACH conversion. With the Recorder, I can tell it to click on the button every .XXX microseconds. I can even tell it to start doing that at 2:00 AM !
The next message below will detail an example of creating the text file from scratch that you need to make a new, custom texture.binnull

[crossup]

First you need a directory with just your H tiles in it.
Then type at a DOS prompt:
DIR /B > txtDIR.txt where the .txt name is what ever you want
-this gives you a text file with JUST the texture filenames. HINT: the name MUST start with "H" or txt2tbin.pl will fail.
-to fix it if its not H
Use REN *.pcx H???????.pcx - you must follow this format as you want to produce files name that are 8.3 compliant - this may become important to you in a few weeks ( oops, did I let something slip?)
Ok now:
-open WordPad and load txtDIR.txt
- insert a blankline at the top , type "endset"
-then on next line " set 4"
-copy those 2 lines with NO extra or trailing spaces to clipboard
-delete them but leave the blank line, leave cursor on top line
-now with the Recorder running recorded/create the following actions: ( I find this clumsy, but its easy to edit it to what you want) remember the "dashes -" are my step delimiter for here, not part of macro)
-Switch txtDIR.txt
-Label Start ( any name, its a goto label)
-down arrow
-control right arrow x 3 times( gets us to end of line, past the period)
- (this is 1 press of space bar)
-0 ( number zero)
- (spacebar again)
-0
-Enter
-control V - for paste
-Goto Start
then all you do is click replay and it loops , inserting the set and endset lines and 0 0 for path info.
At the end you just click "abort replay" and clean up any extra text
-run txt2tbin.pl to make texture.bin, ignore the errors - if Julian gets time he may change this


since the tile set type is "fixed" here , we will have to use CATE to change it, BMP rules look the best to me for this. Assuming we need to change it, Im confused on that right now...
MUCH better than upteen bazillion keystrokes!