Watercrown Productions

Okay, no trophies. And I’m still not quite ready to release TheCheat 2.0 to the public. But in the meantime, I’ve updated TheCheat’s page to reflect my current browsing habits (PMing me on RHDN is your best bet, as I rarely visit Acmlm and my old DevBlog – remember that? – is pretty much dead), and provide a valuable usage hint for people using TheCheat to format scripts that use characters outside the usual ASCII set (save as UTF-8, people! You can do it in Notepad; check the page for more info!).

Thanks to kogami for pointing out this issue!

I SURE DOES!

Pardon the intentionally bad English. In response to feedback regarding the functionality (and lack thereof) of TheCheat, I’ve been working on the next generation of the program, a complete rewrite from the ground up.

I call it…TheCheat 2.0. (Cue the laugh track.)

TheCheat was meant to be a VWF previewer and formatting tool. Problem is, formatting is a bigger chore than it has any right to be: the script loading functions are shambolic at best, making the single most effective way of using TheCheat as a formatting tool copying-and-pasting every single page of text into the viewer. In other words, it’s not very effective at all.

The new version of TheCheat is meant to do precisely what the original was meant to do…for reals this time. (Again, pardon the Homestar reference.) When it’s done, it will be possible to handle all aspects of script editing in TheCheat itself. TheCheat ignores comments and Atlas commands by default, and its dictionary of what to ignore and what to parse will be fully extendable. The preview window will show you exactly what the text will look like in game. All you have to do is tell TheCheat how to treat your tags.

I can’t make any release estimates at this time, but I’ve got most of the basic functions implemented. Watch this page for further details!

After several days of unannounced updates and almost a month of silence, TheCheat 1.4 is now available for download with a bunch of new features.

Get it from the link at the left. Or below. Whichever you prefer.

TheCheat, my completely unannounced homage to/ripoff of Stefan Pettersson’s Bitmap Font Writer, has been completed and is now up for download here.

If you ever had problems with formatting VWF text for your translation work, here’s the answer to hopefully at least one of your prayers.