Hey guys. I've seen a few posts asking about how to use the program, so I thought I'd paste a little guide. I've been doing this where I don't have access to the program (what sort of school computer doesn't have ZIP support?), so I may have referred to something by a slightly wrong name or something, but it should be fairly good. Soon I'll make it HTML and add images and links, but I figure for now you can do without. It will also help in that you can tell me what's missing or could use a better explanation before I put it up.
Download Anicro Desapro------------------------------
This is the main window of Anicro Desapro, and the first you'll see upon running the program.
At the top left you'll notice a picture of a dog's head; that's my grandparents' dog, Toby. His was the first image I tested with and put in the game, and I decided he'd be a good sample image that wouldn't infringe on any copyrights. If you click on Toby's head, it will bring up the Open dialog, where you can choose any image of the types .jpg, .gif, .bmp, or .ico. If the image is larger than 32x32, it will automatically size it down. Note that if you pick a wide or tall image, it will still squeeze it into a square. If it's smaller than 32x32 it will either stretch it or leave it in the center, depending on which option is chosen on the main form near the mid-right.
Under Toby's head are two buttons. Closest Color is the most important; click on it, and it will try to match the image to the various color sets of Animal Crossing, and display them to the right. It does this by finding the closest match for each pixel. The other button, Semi-Random (Speckly), does a similar job. Rather than picking the closest color, though, it randomly chooses from the closest two. I'd hoped this would make a sort of a dithering effect, but it just doesn't look very good in practice. I'm not sure dithering would really do very good at 32x32 anyway. The only reason I don't remove it from the program is that I already went through the trouble of making it, so I might as well leave it there in case anyone does find a good use for it.
If you click on any of the 16 result images, it will bring up a larger version of that image in the Design View window, where it will be easier to copy from and possible to make modifications to. You can actually click on these squares without feeding an image through the program; it will bring up the Design View blank (filled with color 15) and ready for you to start a design from scratch.
Under the Closest Color and Semi-Random buttons, you'll see a choice of color versions to choose from. They're all different attempts to match the same Animal Crossing colors. However, considering differences in TV settings, and that
different people trying their best have come up with different results, I don't want to choose one as being right and the others wrong. So you can choose which seems right to you. Note that when changing them, the effects won't happen automatically; you'll have to hit Closest Color again, or refresh the Design View, or whatever, otherwise things just remain as they are. Where did the colors come from? Two sets are from The Living Robot. The Old one is the set I originally had in the early released version of Anicro Desapro, since they were the only ones I had. Many thought the colors were quite off, and indeed some are. The Living Robot made a new set, and those are on the list as well. In my Google searchings about Anicro Desapro I ran across another dissatisfied with Anicro's old colors, Warlock, and got another set of colors, though incomplete. The newest (so far) is Animal Crossing Community's. I tried putting a design I'd made with Anicro on their site and the colors didn't quite jive, so I figured it would make a good addition; most of Animal Crossing Community's colors came from Pixie & Quill's page, though.
Underneath everything else are Design View Options, to change the appearance of the Design View. At the top-left are several textboxes. Cell Side is how long in pixels a single square of a design will be, in pixels. Between Cells is how far apart these squares will be, again in pixels. Cell Font Size is the font size. To the right of these are a few checkboxes. Show Numbers switches on or off the displaying of numbers in the squares of the design view, which help to tell similar colors apart. Quarters tells whether to have lines splitting the design into quarters or not. Printer View takes away the color from the squares, which would make it less ink-sucking and definitely easier to see if printing with a black-and-white printer. Though you'll have to use Print Screen and whatever image program you know to actually print anything from the program at this time. There are then two RGB values on the bottom; the one on the left is for the design view background, and the one on the right is for the lines that split the design into quarters.
Design View
The options for the look of the Design View are in the main window.
The main part of the window is of course taken by the larger version of the actual design.
Single-clicking on one of the 15 colors of the palette shown at the right will make it the "selected color" for the freehand operations. It will get a bit bigger and gain some asterisks to make it stand out. Double-clicking on one of these same 15 colors will refresh the design view, in case you've changed something with the options or bent the window into a weird shape or something.
To the direct right of the 15 colors are checkboxes. If you unselect a checkbox, that color won't be displayed anymore (though you'll need to manually refresh the view once you've checked/unchecked what you want). This can be useful for looking at just one color at a time, or taking away the background color to make things look less needlessly cluttered.
To the right of those checkboxes are the freehand tools. Single is pretty simple. If you have Single selected, and have a selected color, you can click on a single square and it will change. I haven't figured out how I can let someone keep the mouse button down and have it keep changing the color wherever the cursor is, so you'll just have to change things one at a time. Fill is a fill option as you're probably familiar with from other programs. Click a square of color 13, and all the color 13's connected to that square will change to your selected color. Next is Line. The use of Line is a bit precise. First, click Line. Then click where the beginning of the line should be. Then click where the ending of the line should be. It should then draw the line, and select Single again, so you don't accidentally begin another line. If you're not satisfied with any single change you've made using the freehand tools, you can use the Undo button, which just changes the image back to what it was like before the last Single, Fill, or Line you did.
Double-clicking on the small version of the image at the bottom-right will take the current image and put it in the current ACS list, giving it a temporary name of "temp" followed by several random numbers.
Palette Window
This is the palette window. Here you can see at a glance all the colors for all the palettes for whichever set of colors you currently have picked.
You can do more than just look, though; you can actually disable certain colors. If, say, color 1 of palette 13 is showing up in your result image and it shouldn't be, you can click on that color in this window to disable it. The color it picks instead may look worse, but you can give it a shot. You disable a certain color by clicking on it. It will get the text NULL in it to indicate that that color won't be taken into consideration. Clicking on it again will turn it back to normal. Alternately you can click on the "Make All Valid" button at the top to set things back to how they were to begin with, with no NULL colors.
ACS Window
This is the ACS window. It serves as your base of operations for ACS files.
I chose ACS to stand for "Animal Crossing Simple", since it saves pretty much the same data for a design that the Animal Crossing game does; the pattern, the palette number, and a 16-character name. Multiple designs can be saved in a single ACS file, with each taking up a little more than half a kilobyte.
At the left is the list of designs. When you have one selected, you can use several of the other buttons in the window. Move Up moves the design up in the list (if possible), Move Down does the opposite, and Remove deletes it from the list. You can also rename a design using the textbox at the top right of the window. If you put a long name in the box, though, only the first 16 characters will go into the name. When an item from the list is highlighted, a small image of the design will show to the right. Click the Design View button over that image, and the image will go to the Design View window.
Then there are the Save and Load commands; I'm pretty sure you can guess what they're for. They work pretty much as you'd expect them to. Choose Save and you can choose where to save the file and what to call it, and later bring it back up with the Load command.
To start an ACS file in the first place by adding an image, check the instructions for the Design View window.
Posted: 2/27/2003 12:19pm Edited: 3 Staff Edited
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Actually, I'm going to delete them now, since they're not doing any good.
