Heya,

I've been using Strange Eons to work on a custom expansion for Arkham Horror, and have been very impressed with the quality of the program, and how well it works.

Unfortunately I've run into one problem that's brought everything to a grinding halt, and it is frustrating me to no end.

The image files used for many of the images in the Strange Eons resources are in JP2 (Jpeg 2000) format. I'm having a lot of difficulty finding software that I can use to edit or convert this file type, since it's apparently a pretty new image compression format. I just want to use some of my own icons for locations (as in the plugin editor example) but don't have a JP2 compatible image editor, and converting them to PNG and back isn't working.

I tried the trial version of BatchIt Ultra to convert- and it's fine for converting from JP2 to PNG, but then can't go back to JP2 again (or at least when it tries, all my images come out as a grey square.)

Photoshop has a jp2 plugin, but it's expensive. (I'm also just using the trial version of Photoshop CS4, so that's not a long-term solution anyway). Paint.NET doesn't support JP2. Gimp supposedly has a plugin, but the comments on the source code download page indicate that it doesn't work properly.

Surely with the popularity of the Strange Eons program, someone else has solved this problem. Any suggestions?

--TMIB

TMIB said:

You don't need to be able to read or write JP2 to customize SE. It will also accept images in PNG and JPEG format. You can use any of these formats anywhere that an image is required.

If you want to read the existing images in order to edit them or what have you, have a look at the SE plug-in authoring kit. It includes an example script that will batch convert all of the SE images from JP2 format to PNG.

If you want to read and/or write JP2 images from Photoshop, then there are a few options:

1. Recent versions of Photoshop (starting with CS3 or so) include JPEG2000 support but do no install it by default. You have to find it on the install CD and install it from there.

2. There are a couple of different freely available JPEG2000 plug-ins available online. I like this one: < http://www.fnordware.com/j2k/ >. There is one caveat with using it. I find that when I save images with transparency, the saved image often has subtle issues (transparency in the wrong places) unless I first save the image as a PNG, then reopen it and save THAT as a JP2. There seems to be something having an image with layers that messes up the plug-in, although just flattening the image is not always enough to get it to save correctly.

Cheers,
Chris

There are a number of third party plug-ins that make whatever graphics program you use work with the jp2k files. Personally, my computer stopped recognizing my photoshop disk years ago, so I've had to go to third party plug ins every time I want to update the program. I don't even know why, but the third party plugins work fine with my photoshop, so whatever.

-Frank

Thelric said:

Unfortunately, I'm having an issue with the SE conversion script; I run the script on a directory of .JP2 files (the ones in example 6) and it creates PNG images that are blank.

However, I'm able to get BatchIT to convert from JP2 to PNG, so I'm at least able to progress. I should have read in the plugins doc where it's mentioned that PNG file format is understood. Thanks for the info!

--TMIB

TMIB said:

Hmm. I'll have to look at it when I get a chance. Thanks for letting me know.

Cheers,
Chris

I did indeed fix the problem with this script, for anyone else who needs help with JP2s. Also, I have confirmed that there is a JPEG2000 file format plug-in for Photoshop on the install CD at least as far back as CS2.

Cheers,
Chris