Tool: WGC.exe - trigger-segfault/TriggersTools.CatSystem2 GitHub Wiki

Tool: WGC.exe

The graphical interface tool WGC is used to create and extract HG‐3 Image (.hg3), HG‐2 Image (.hg2), and more CatSystem image formats. It is available in many of the publicly released CatSystem2 toolsets.

🚧 This page is a work in progress

Usage

Drag image files from Windows Explorer into the WGC window to add them to the list. From here, you may right click the file, or choose from the menu bar Convert! menu, to convert the selected or all images in the list.

Settings

Click Settings on the menu bar to configure how images are converted.

All input formats are accepted, and do not need to be selected by a setting.

Input formats: .psd, .hg3, .hg2, ... .png, .jpg, .bmp

Output formats: .hg3, .hg2, .wpm, ... .png, .jpg, .bmp

WPM Image is a format with unknown usage. It only contain the original image's Blue color channel.

PSD format features

When converting with WGC, the HG3 and HG2 output formats require using the PSD input format to use most of their features!

  • Multiple frames in a single image
  • Image attributes (used for drawing effects over characters)
  • Image origin/base position (required for aligning all character sprite parts using difference images)

Photoshop and PSD format

Photoshop is used to setup PSD images to convert with WGC. It's an expensive product to use only for organizing image data (especially with the switch to a subscription model).

Alternative programs work too, but may not support the full range of organizational features used by WGC. The Autodesk Sketchbook program works well enough, and is provided with Windows 10. However, it does not support folders / nested image layers (which is a non-essential feature).

Extracting HG3 and HG2 images

Extraction of HG3 and HG2 images requires no fancy steps.

  1. Set the output format setting to PNG (JPG and BMP also work)
  2. Convert any selected .hg3 or .hg2 image files.

About HG3 and HG2 ID format

Because these formats support multiple image frames (IDs), files are extracted with the following name format: %name%_%04d.%ext%. So extracting something such as "sys_title.hg3" will yield:

"sys_title_0000.png", "sys_title_0010.png", "sys_title_0100.png", "sys_title_0101.png", "sys_title_0200.png", "sys_title_0201.png", ... and so on

Images used for drawing screens do not use ID numbers in a continuous incrementing order. Different assets are stored in one image by allocating X range of IDs to them, most often this uses a unique multiple of 10 or 100. Like so, with the made up file "sys_title.hg3":

ID Screen Asset
0000 Title background
0010 Title logo
0100 'Start' button
0101 'Start' button (hover)
0102 'Start' button (pressed)
0200 'Load' button
0201 'Load' button (hover)
0202 'Load' button (pressed)
0203 'Load' button (disabled)
... ...

See also

External links

Todo:

  • Add images
  • Add UI translation
  • List locale requirements