Welcome to the second release of BitMat!

I wrote this program so you level editors out there can take advantage of the variety of textures offerred in Dark Forces. I began writing this as a part of a Dark Forces 3DO to Jedi Knight 3DO converter, but I realized that perhaps someone would want to be able to use these textures for levels. And now, with the ability of JED to convert DF LEV files, an update seemed necessary.

I wrote it in a very straight-forward fashion, three fields are required for its useage:

The Directory containing all the BMs you want to convert. This should be the complete path with a trailing backslash. For instance

C:\DARK\BMs\

The Filename of the Dark Forces or DOS palette file. This is a raw file of 768 bytes that contains 256 red, green, blue byte entries. The file Standard.pal is included with BitMat. It is a copy of Secbase.pal.

The Filename of the Jedi Knight Colormap file. These files contain palette and shading information. Their complete spec is available at Darkjedi. BitMat will use this file to convert the Dark Forces colors to Jedi Knight. This conversion can be stopped by unchecking the box underneath it. NOTE: Even if you uncheck the box, you will still have to enter a valid CMP file. The file Standard.cmp is included, it is just a copy of Uicolorm.cmp.

This program will convert all BM files in a given directory to the MAT specification. Multiple or "animated" BMs are not supported at this time, maybe in the next version.

This program will not handle compressed BMs simply because there was no point in taking the time to code that feature when all BMs in the full version of the game were uncompressed.

There is a simple viewer built in that will only look "good" when used in 16bit color or higher graphics modes. That feature was very last-minute, so I felt no need to optimize it.

I would like to thank Yves Borckmans for writing the original DF Specs and Dave, Jereth, and Alex for keeping it going.

Lastely, be sure to read LEC's license agreement. I'm not sure about the legalities, but I think as long as you don't make or plan on making money with the use of these textures, all is good.

Additional Information:

Simply put, I'm open to any suggestions you may have. Post any questions, comments, or bugs on the Darkjedi messageboard. I will look there first.

The newest releases of this program can be found at the Code Alliance's Home at www.darkjedi.com

THIS PROGRAM IS COPYRIGHTED FREEWARE. IT IS NOT GIVEN TO THE PUBLIC DOMAIN. I HOLD ALL COPYRIGHTS TO IT.

THIS PROGRAM IS PROVIDED AS IS. NO WARRANTY IS EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED. I AM NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY DAMAGE TO YOUR SYSTEM. USE AT YOUR OWN RISK.