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Office Assistant - file format question

PostPosted: January 12th, 2007, 6:13 pm
by zgb2005
Hi,

I wonder if you discover a way to convert .acs file format to .aal (to be able to use it with Office Assistant).
There are a lot of .acs characters on Internet which could be used with this great component if the conversion is posible. I looked around on Internet a lot and I didn't find any tool which can do that.
Or if the conversion isn't posible, why Office Assistant doesn't just use .acs file as-is.

Thanks in advance,
Habib

PostPosted: January 12th, 2007, 9:02 pm
by Kambiz
Please look at the following topic:
http://forum.delphiarea.com/viewtopic.php?t=2

PostPosted: January 12th, 2007, 10:18 pm
by zgb2005
Hi,

Thanks for reply.

Well, to capture all the individual bitmaps of the .acs file and then recreate the animations from scratch inside the editor it's a lot of work :(

Maybe I can suggest you to build a conversion tool in the future (unfortunately I'm not that good in Delphi to build one, I began five months ago only and I'm still learning), but I spoke with Remi Lebeau (he has a similar component but for C++ Builder and he is good in MSAgent stuff) and he told me this:

"since the editor's full souce code is publically available,
and I do have working documentation about the inner format of .acs
files, it is tecnically possible to create such a conversion tool. It
would just be a matter of working out the format of .aal files. I do
see that he is essentially writing the actor data to a binary block,
and then using dcc32.exe to wrap that data into a standard Win32 DLL
with an .aal file extension."

Thanks for all,
Habib

PostPosted: January 13th, 2007, 8:49 am
by Kambiz
Yes, everything is possible but needs a free time that is not accessible.