Package com.hdcookbook.grin.binaryconverter

This package contains a program that compiles a show file.

See:
Description

Class Summary

Main	A tool that converts a text based GRIN script to the binary format.

Package com.hdcookbook.grin.binaryconverter Description

This package contains a program that compiles a show file. It reads it, generates a binary show file, and optionally transforms all image assets to a mosaic.

Mosaic making is done using a fairly brute-force "first fit" algorithm that isn't completely optimal, but seems to work quite well in practice. When run, this program produces a modified set of assets to be used with the show file. The show file itself doesn't need to be modified, because a "map" file is produced that maps the filename of the original image to a set of coordinates within a matrix file. Just package up the map file and the matrixes, and leave out the original images in the disc image.

This is a build-time tool that runs with the JDK. It requires parts of the GRIN library to run, so you should probably just build the whole thing.

In your application, you need to tell GRIN where the image map file is. For debugging purposes, It's sometimes handy to set an xlet up so that it will work with either the discrete images or the mosaic, to speed build times. In the HD cookbook menu, I did this, right after setting AssetFinder's search path:

        if (AssetFinder.tryURL("images.map") != null) { 
            if (Debug.LEVEL > 0) {
                Debug.println("Found images.map, using mosaic.");
            }
            AssetFinder.setImageMap("images.map"); 
        } else if (Debug.LEVEL > 0) {
                Debug.println("No images.map, not using mosaic.");
        }

As of this writing, the mosaic construction algorithm isn't fully optimized, and the mosaic image can only be in PNG. Some players decode JPEG faster than PNG, but JPEG doesn't support alpha and you have to worry about setting the quality of JPEG output if you go that route. This tool presently doesn't have a way of grouping related images together, which would be important for managing image loading and unloading if you can't just keep everything in memory.