I've never been very good at creating game art, so when I want to make a game, I try to find a game whose 'look' matches what I'm after, find out the format of that game's files, and then rip that game's art out to my own custom file format that I can easily access.
Accessing these files in most languages would be easy as long as you knew the layout of the format. But could a program written in GM6/GM7 access these files?
For example, let's say I've encoded all the paladin animations from D2 in a file. To read out a frame of animation, you would need to:
1. Read in a global 256-color palette.
2. Read in the frame header, which includes information like 'size of compressed frame data' and 'offset to compressed frame data'.
3. Read in the compressed frame data from the correct place in the file.
4. The frame data is compressed in LLE format (similar to RLE), so you would need to uncompress the data using a simple algorithm.
5. The frame uncompresses as an 8bit/pixel image, so if you're not in 8bit graphics mode, you would need to generate the frame by iterating through the uncompressed frame data and drawing the frame, pixel by pixel, using the palette look-up data.
Is all of this possible in GM?