Oldest file format I could find is this one (notice no temperature field, or tmp, or tmp2). This is a real antique format. However for backward compatability, even the latest version of TPT can read it. This should make converting pictures to TPT layouts a breeze when I've finished making my conversion program. I've abandoned the OPS1 format. Just way to much to it with all that BSON crap.

Here's the specs I managed to reverse engineer from using a hex editor to look at a few saved stamps in this old format (an act of reverse engineering that would be impossible with a BSON based format).

Format of oldest save/stamp file:
Header
BZip2 compressed data


Format of header:
4ByteAsciiString ID letters "PSv " (last slot is actually null 0x00 character)
Byte major version number
Byte block size
Byte width in blocks
Byte height in blocks
Int32 size of data after decompressing



Format of BZip2 compressed data:
ByteArray walls
ByteArray fan X velocities (only stored for fan type walls)
ByteArray fan Y velocities (only stored for fan type walls)
ByteArray particles
ByteArrayX ByteArrayY particle velocities (stored as x/y pairs, only stored if particle present)
ByteArray particle life (only stored if particle present)
ByteArray particle ctype (only stored for CLNE)
Byte number of signs
SignsArray (only stored if number of signs > 0)

Sign format
Int16 x position
Int16 y position
Byte justification (0=left 1=center 2=right)
Byte length
AsciiString text


Notes on velocities.
Velocities are positive if the velocity byte value is 128 to 255 and negative if 126 to 0.
Velocities are 0 if the velocity byte value is 127.
This means it is possible to have a greater positive velocity than negative velocity.
Note that the particle velocity byte values are much less than the actual pixel per frame velocities.
For example, 128 is 1 above 127, but it actually corresponds to a velocity of much less than 1 pixel per frame.

Notes on life.
Life byte value is actually 1/4 of the value in the software.
For example, if the value of a byte in the array is 3, the corresponding particle will have a life of 12 in TPT.

@jacksonmj (View Post)
As far as I know it is ok to upload saves that have been "plotted" as long as you uncheck the box called "publish" in TPT, or if you forget this, go to your profile page on the site and click the "lock save" button. This will prevent others from voting on it (which is the primary goal here, as voting should be reserved for giving your opinion of someone's hard-work based creation, not a converted image), but will also allow others to download it even if they can't vote on it (not sure if commenting is possible on a locked/unpublished save though).

@boxmein (View Post)
Someone once told me it was ok, I think in another forum post I was asking about it or in the PM/conversations section of my account. So since someone said it was ok, not against the rules as long as it was private, I just assumed it was in fact ok and not against the rules if you kept it a private save.

By the way, my plotting program is coming along nicely. I even recorded a frames of it running with the R key and then using other pieces software to get the frames into a video and a small enough one to upload to Youtube in a reasonable time frame (original video after assembling frames with VirtualDub was Raw RGB AVI at over 600MB, FFMPEG conversion to MPEG4 with H264 codec brought it to under 50MB). Sadly Youtube butchered the video, despite me uploading the video with high quality (yes the quality was high, despite the high compression, because with so few colors used compression is fairly easy). But it's enough quality (even after Youtube's butchering) to demonstrate the outcome of my TPT image plotter software running in TPT. It's the standard "Water lilies.jpg" sample image that comes with Windows XP that I used for my first test conversion.



So far it's a prototype only, but when it's done, I'll upload it to Mediafire and post download links in the description in my Youtube video, and also on this forum in this thread in another one dedicated to my software.

I found a bug in my program. I fixed it.

I've added the ability to load any picture from file using the LoadFile dialog box of the Common Dialog OCX control. (in my prototype version, the filename was fixed so it always automatically loaded one picture for testing purposes)

I've added the ability to, upon loading an input image, select output image size between 612x384 (the currently used window size in TPT) and 512x384 (the really old window size used in TPT)

I'd say it's in its beta phase now. It's almost ready to be released.