Tharify is the first step in expanding Abiathar's compatibility beyond the Keen Galaxy map format. It's fairly simple: you can convert from the Vorticons level style to Galaxy (tharification), and when you're done editing with Abiathar you can convert back to Vorticons (detharification). This also works on, among other things, Hovertank 3D.
Links (the bridge/switch offsets) are automatically converted between the Vorticons relative yyxx and the Galaxy absolute xxyy.
When converting to Galaxy, Tharify creates a foreground tileset bitmap corresponding to the Vorticons tiles and an infoplane tileset bitmap containing sprite icons. The background tileset contains two tiles: the first Vorticons tile (because the first foreground tile is always rendered completely transparent) and a "not a link" text tile, the presence of which suppresses the infoplane value link adjustment when converting back to Vorticons. Graphics will not be converted back to Vorticons EGA.
To tharify, run Tharify with the first parameter set to "/thar". You must specify the level extension with "/ext" and the name of the Abiathar ADEPS file with "/adeps". If you renamed any of your Vorticons EGA resources, use "/ega <head> <latch> <sprit>" after specifying /ext. If you don't have Vorticons EGA graphics, use "/levelsonly" (which takes no extra parameters) to skip creation of the ADEPS and the graphics. (You'll need to create your own ADEPS if you use that.)
Supplying the "/saveconf" option plus a filename writes the setup to a file for easy detharifying later: use the "/conf" option to load options from a file rather than the command line.
Examples:
- Convert all Keen 2 levels to a Galaxy set bound to an Abiathar file called k2.adeps: tharify.exe /thar /ext ck2 /adeps k2.adeps
- Convert all Keen 3 levels supplying the names of renamed EGA resources and saving configuration for ease of detharification later: tharify.exe /thar /ext ck3 /ega GFXHEAD.CK3 GFXTILES.CK3 SPRITES.CK3 /adeps k3.adeps /saveconf k3.thfy
- Convert Hovertank 3D levels, but don't do a graphics conversion (Hovertank has sort-of-Galaxy-style graphics): tharify.exe /thar /ext hov /levelsonly
Examples:
- Convert Keen 1 levels back to Vorticons: tharify.exe /vort /adeps k1.adeps /ext ck1
- Convert back to Vorticons using a saved configuration file: tharify.exe /vort /conf thfy.txt
- Convert Hovertank levels back to individual HOV files: tharify.exe /vort /adeps hov3d.adeps /ext HOV /levelsonly
Tharify must be placed in a directory containing Abiathar and its DLLs.
Download Tharify
This is a temporary solution until native support for the Vorticons format is added to Abiathar, though it is fun to play with. (It's kind of like how I released FxTomDMh and ManTliMh separately until they were supplanted by actual Abiathar/FleexCore2 support.)
Happy Keen Day, everyone!
Fleexy