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10-21-14 07:54 AM by: Digital_Utopia
The beta version of BLPNG Converter : Mac was released, which makes the next step, the Mac version of the BLP Photoshop plugin.

and on that note...



All that's left is getting the save options dialogue working. The version being used above, has the method that displays the dialogue commented out, as it's causing some "fun" errors right now. And of course, no options - no saving. So I'll be working on that, and hopefully get to the bottom of it.
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10-20-14 12:58 AM by: Digital_Utopia
Just got finished with importing and testing the actual conversion code for the Mac version of BLPNG Converter, and everything seems to be in working order. At this point, the only real heavy coding left to go is converting the raw pixel data into the PNG format, and handling writing both to disk.

Now for some potentially bad news. The collection of code that does the actual BLP conversion, is written in C++. For whatever reason, in Mountain Lion's version of XCode - Apple has decided to only support C++ for OS X 10.7 (Lion) and newer. I had hoped to go as far back as Snow Leopard (10.6); but the benefit simply doesn't match up to the extra effort, in my opinion.

First off, the user share (among Mac users) for versions 10.7 and above, add up to an astounding 85.6%.
Second, Blizzard has listed 10.8 (Mountain Lion) as the minimum requirement for Warlords of Draenor
Third, OS X 10.9 (Mavericks) is free - so if your Mac can run WoW, there should be no reason not to have at least 10.7

So, 10.7 will be the minimum supported version with this.

It's also worth mentioning that, due to the nature of Photoshop plugins - namely the fact that they're not applications, and that they don't interact directly with OS X, the Mac version of the BLP Photoshop plugin may not face this limitation. The goal is still 10.6 for that.
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10-19-14 04:10 AM by: Digital_Utopia
So, about that last post...

Sometime fairly shortly after making that last post, my largest hard drive took a dive. That drive contained my OS X install, among many other things. The good news is, that I managed to salvage most of my important data. The bad, was my Mac partition wasn't among said data. Unfortunately, that was only the tip of the iceberg when it came to bad news.

Anyway - I'm not posting this to start a pity party, just wanted to explain why the mac related section of both of my BLP projects here - are getting pretty embarrassing by now.

So. Back to WoW, both BLP related projects have been recently updated, and I immediately followed that up with getting Mountain Lion re-installed. The latter part took a good 4 days - mostly because I forgot how the hell I did it the first time. But. Everything's working right now except for the sound, and I don't need sound to code.

The Mac version of BLPNG Converter is coming along nicely - UI itself is done, and the code behind it is getting pretty close as well. Most of what's left on that end, boils down to stuff like saving settings, handling writing permissions, and preparing the images for conversion to BLP. Once that's complete, the final major step is hooking it up to the code that actually does the converting.

So, enough blabbing for now - how about some screenshots?


Basic initial view - same drop zone layout as the Windows one - sans menu bar of course.


Conversion progress modeled off the standard copy progress dialogue


(Successful) Conversion complete view, with a disabled "Log" button. Different message and icon will show if there are errors, and the log button will display a similar error log to the Windows version.
As I promised, BLPNG Converter is my "practice" for getting the hang of XCode and Cocoa to prepare for the Mac version of my Photoshop BLP Plugin. Today I'd like to share a preview of what this version is going to look like.



At this point, the UI is about halfway done. Drag & Drop, as well as all the major code to set up the actual conversion - including the progress bar, and related text. Menu items still need to be done, as well as the finishing screen and the error report, but the most complicated Mac-related part is done.

More information will be made available as I get closer to finishing, including a projected release date. Currently, I'm targeting 10.6 and newer.
I spent most of the day struggling my best against an inconvenient truth - so to speak. My initial goal was to maintain the same requirements for BLPNG Converter v2.0, as they were for 1.0 - and unfortunately, settled for a mixed result.

The good news is, that those of you still sticking with Windows xp, aren't going to be left out - even if it did require moving the code over to VS 2010, as (amusingly) VS 2012 projects are only compatible with Vista on up.

The bad news however, is that you're going to need to upgrade to .NET 4.0, and due to the switch in language, you'll also need VC++ Redistributable. The irony of having to require more, and newer for a switch to a more "basic" language (from C# to (M)C++) does not escape me. However, chances are, you most likely already have the latter - if not the former.

Beyond that though, the UI, and its features are nearly complete. All that remains is saved settings support, for those of you who would prefer using different BLP settings than the default (DXT5 w/ 8-bit Alpha).

With the goal of maintaining the utmost in portability by default, choosing to have settings saved will be an option that will be off by default. If such an option is chosen, a simple .xml file will be stored in a subfolder within your Application Data/App Data folder. So even then, there won't be any nasty registry entries, or obnoxious installers to have to worry about.