Wc3 CTGen v0.3.0

My first post/tool on this site... Enjoy!

Wc3 CTGen is one of many programs I have made for warcraft and just general programs. It stands for Warcraft 3 Color-Text-Generator. What it does is...

• Makes formatting colored text in warcraft easy by allowing previews of your text with various background colors (black and white) and various background images (grass, snow, water...) with a few different default colored foregrounds (black, white, yellow) in one nice window.
• Makes finding and choosing color codes in warcraft simple by using a built-in windows dll that allows the select of about 16 billion colors and formats it to warcraft for you.
• Allows you to easily create gradient text using a gradient text wizard

Additional Notes...

• This program was created using autohotkey and only works on the Windows operating system. You can't use wine on a linux to run it either because it uses COM to embed an IE control into the GUI.
• Works on Windows XP (and more, but I don't have proof of that), most likely requires IE 3.0 and up.
• This will convert your text to html so that it can be previewed, so you can get the html of it I think by right clicking the preview.
• This is an open source project, feel free to edit, but give some credit to me if you release a new version. You can get autohotkey if you want to edit it.

Download -
You can download Wc3 CTGen here... Oh there are attachments... Its safest to go with this link because I have this program posted on a few sites all using the same URL so its much easier to update and posted to everyone by using one link. Please use the download url, not the attachment.

Screen Shots -
You can find the screen shots in the attachments below. They were saved as .gif so with 256 color, so the color is off on some of the images, but its pretty accurate.

Please reply with your feedback! It will be greatly appreciated. I hope this makes things easier for a few people when they work on their maps.

--- Note: I'm not sure if this is allowed but for my convenience please use the link that was provided above to download the program, it makes updating it for me and you may get an old version by using the attached file

I don't know, it would be simpler to just update the attachment when you update the tool, not sure how much updates would a color chooser need though. The problem with external links is that they sometimes die...

Well I have this file stored on my website (err more like web space, I don't have my own domain) and its posted on at least 3 forums so I would only need to update the program under the same url once, instead of uploading it on 3 websites. And its not just a color chooser, as I thought I made clear.

The browser error in the back appears when i click Preview.

The front error message appears when i click Make gradient text from the menu when the gradient window is already open.

EDIT: Why is it 2MB? I saw some huge gifs in the download, but couldn't figure out what they do.

Though I don't know german very well at all I can imagine that the browser error is that it can't find the file. If you moved the .exe out of the Wc3 CTGen, that could have caused it and will cause other errors, but that's most likely not the problem. Run the program again and try it, maybe it couldn't generate the file for some reason.

The Msgbox error you got was because the program tried to add things to the original window instead of creating a new window, so there should only be one of the gradient windows open at one time anyway. If I were to change that, more errors would arise I'm sure.

The .gif's are the backgrounds you can use (see the View menu). Right now the loading screen background isn't all that helpful but in future versions I'll have the programs create a div and position it so that it looks like a real loading screen (almost).

Sorry for those small flaws, I'll find out what I can do to make this easier for others as well.

I didn't move any files but here is how you can reproduce the browser error:

1. Start the program
2. Enable Preview
3. Switch from Black to White foreground
4. Disable Preview
5. Re-enable Preview -> browser error appears

As for the other error message: Yes i know it's because an instance of the window is already open. But instead of popping up the error message the more user friendly solution would be bringing to front the already existing window without an error message.

Do not get discouraged from my comments. The functionality is already there, it just needs small fixes here and there.

I'll look up and see if there is a way to not show errors, its autohotkey that shows the error, not me, I just made the error on accident. And as for the preview, I forgot to disable all menu items on the view menu except preview.

Actually to fix the error thing I could have it check, as you said, and yea just bring it to the front. Hmm... That shouldn't be too hard at all to do.

So far in the next update you will see those two problems fixed. On TheHiveWorkshop someone requested support for transparent text as well. I had no idea the ff part of |cff was the opacity... I can easily have the program parse that as well, but I'm not sure how to have transparency on text in html... Any ideas? I have it parse the text into span tags so something like "Blah |cff00ff00Blah|r Blah" would become "Blah <span style='color:#00ff00'>Blah</span> Blah" but I don't know where the transparency option should go! Also I need to translate |n into a linefeed character which isn't hard and have the browser have word wrap on if that's possible... I'll have to make a nicely formatted changelog for this. Its also occured to me that the loading screen background needs to have the text positioned where it would really go in a game, so I'll have to figure that out with some added html. Thanks for the feedback and expect a new release to come out some time hopefully in the next week if I'm not busying myself with learning Python or playing Footmen Frenzy

EDIT: I could not replicate the error you got with the browser but I think what I will do can fix that. Though maybe the computer lagged and the file couldn't be produced in time? Also I've fixed the multiple windows by checking its existence, if that's true then it will flash the window, if you don't know what I mean you will know when it happens. I'm working on having it disable those menu items right now.

Update.
View the Release Notes
View the Help File

Ok, I'll check it out.

EDIT: Ah ok, the mentioned problems have been fixed.
Whenever i click Use ... Foreground in the menu i still get an error about a non-existant menu item in line 055, but it doesn't really matter.

Just include a readme like described in the submission guidlines: http://www.wc3campaigns.net/announcement.php?f=637
and attach the latest version to your first post and this should be fine.

The help file is pretty much the readme, as well as the changelog that is stored online (its online so you get the latest versions).

uploaded the new one on the site too

Perhaps you could include a font called "Friz Quadrata TT" in the preview, which is the font Wc3 uses for most of the in-game text, including and especially the game messages that one can trigger.

Cool, I didn't know you posted this here!

I wrote the function that creates gradients (not the GUI portion).