I've elected to put all my SF related material in one place for the benefit of the SF community. If you want to duplicate any portion of this site, feel free. Just be sure to give credit where it's due. All software is distributed as-is with no warranty.
I highly suggest downloading Tcl/Tk and the source versions of this software. The sources are nearly always going to be more current than the executables (my development computer cannot produce windows executables from Tcl/Tk scripts). You'll also want to get the itcl extensions (included if you download Tcl Pro, otherwise available on the same site as Tcl/Tk).
Programming Projects:
| SF_Score | This program allows server operators to generate ranking lists from their server.log (and .server-log) files. Lots of rankings are supported, with more being added all the time. | ||
| SF_Editor | A mammoth project, SF_Editor is intended to bring server creation to the unwashed masses. By automating all the complex interconnections required (a weapon needs a tube, an image and a sound, that means in order to add a custom weapon you need to understand 4 different sections of the server.dat). This makes it all much easier. Bugfix released Aug 7 2001 (no more problems with empty dat sections).
Currently, +-75% of a server can be modified with this program. There are severe deficiencies in the ways sounds, images and modules are handled. |
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| SF Debugger | Unfortunatly SF_Editor doesn't really work. Furthermore, I don't know how long it will be before I have enough time to really do it right. So I've extracted all the code for loading and parsing SF .dat files (which works) and begun to impliment a simple debugger. The idea is you run this against your .dat file and it tells you about the first thing it finds that is wrong. It's much more specific than server.log which should help everyone get their mods working without as many hassles. More importantly (for me), it's designed similarly to the way sf_score is laid out. Whenever I run across a 'new' dat file problem, it is very easy to make the debugger sensitive to that particular situation. That means debugger should get smarter very quickly as long as I'm updating it. | TCL/Tk Source |
My Documentation Projects:
| Server Creation Documentation | When I started in SF, the only existing documentation for how to create or modify servers were the comments included in the default servers. Needless to say this made server creation quite difficult. Endless loops of guess-and-check did result in some impressive new servers (First Contact was created before any proper documentation existed) it was a task left to the few experienced souls. So I gathered together every scrap of information available into this document. | |
| Image Creation Documentaton | Creating new ship and weapon images for SF is not for the faint hearted. As a matter of fact, it's remarkably difficult to create a _good_ 256 color properly formated artifact clean image. The 'animation' format used by SF is a little uncommon, so there arn't any ready-made tools available. This document explains how to use freely downloadable software to model, raytrace, rotate and assemble a high-quality image. | |
| Adding new images to SF Servers | You've got a .bmp and you want to get it into the game. Here's how it all works. | |
| Image transparancy | Plague recently asked about how SF's transparancy system works. For better or worse here's my answer. |
Other Usefull Pieces of Documentation:
| Server Creation Primer (By Anaxis) | Recently the question "How do I get started in making new .DAT's for SF" came up on the newsgroup. Here is one of the replies. | |
| Server Creation Primer (By David Eckard) | Here's another responce to the same question. |