As some of you may know I create UO flash movies. For those that did not know now you do

Recently I started to have problems with UOSuperViewer2 a program that lets you create characters and save the images. You can use the images to create forum signatures avatars flash movies and so on.

So what happened to UOSV2? well it no longer works the way it should because of patches and so on. UOSV2 was written in Pascal (old crappy code) and the author no longer updates the program well he or she may but the person who was translating the program from Japanese to English is no longer doing it and you can no longer find an updated version that works.

So what is this all about?

Well a good friend of mine Ben or as some know him on the net Peoharen are working on a new utility for working with UO graphics. This program is called UOFlashKit because it was primarily designed to help create UO flash movies.

Our utility does more than UOSV2 or any other UO graphics utility in the past has.

You can not only design characters with it but also monsters and items. I plan to add a preset to the item creation so that if you want an image or an artifact you simply hit the preset item drop down and choose the artifact and it will set the item ID and hue for you. I may also do the same for monsters so you can quickly get an image of a white wyrm or mare.

The idea is to be as user friendly and quick as possible so that when you want to create something you can without all the time spent cutting characters monsters and items out of screen shots. You will be able to whip up what you need toss it into photoshop or another image editor and go.

Here is a preview of the current layout. You will see the program is unfinished but trust me it is close to being complete. This image does give you an idea of how it will be in the release though.



The program will be available in the very near future and I will be sure to announce it here as well as a few other places.

If anyone has anything they think may improve this feel free to make some suggestions and I will see about getting them into the initial release.

Looking forward to more info on this DD as release day for it gets closer.

Sounds excelent. Will you be able to export animations that can be used as forum avatars?

Yeah that is the purpose. You can create a character and dress it however you want then pose it using any animation frame or direction you want. All items on the character can be hued and so on. Once you have your character posed and dressed how you like you can save an image. There is an animation slider to advance the animation one frame at a time. So if you choose the death animation it begins with the first frame of that animation and you can advance through the animation and back to find the frame you want for the pose.

I plan to do as much as I can to make this not only very easy to use but very fast because if your creating a flash movie it is already extremely time consuming without having to do a bunch of work editing character frames to use. With this you will be able to quickly design what you need for what your doing and move right to creating your project skipping most of the work preparing materials for it.

The initial release is probably only going to support saving designed characters as a .ufk file so you can reopen the character later rather than redressing and hueing it all over again. And also saving the image of the designed character.

However later on once there is time I would like this to have the ability to export character sheets. So you can save a single frame save an animation sequence which would be one image file with each frame of the characters current animation on it and save a character sheet that would have every animation sequence possible in order on a single image all lined out nicely.

Items will not have a sheet because there are no complex animations with them. Yes some do have animations but they are very simple so I do not plan to add anything more than saving an image of the created item.

Monsters will also have both sequence and full sheets though.

Well quit screwing around here and get back to work.

Looking forward to taking it for a test drive!

Sounds promising.

The last thing I made in flash was a dancing rat man, but I just used Inside UO for that, haha.

The program is moving along nicely

I also got Adobe CS3 Master Collection today so I am trying to get the program finished asap so I can use that and CS3 to create another UO flash movie. The anticipation is killing me seriously. I have not been this excited about completing a project and creating something in flash in ages.