splitshp(1)

💅 splitshp — the manual page, bestie edition

okay so you found splitshp(1), the General Commands Manual page. it's a little command with big main-character energy: it splits Shapes into frames and glues frames back into Shapes. let's get into it 🦋

✨ NAME ✨

splitshp — Split Shape into frames or combine frames into Shapes

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

splitshp SHAPE FRAME...

splitshp SHAPE

🎀 DESCRIPTION 🎀

So. Shape files. They're how the games Exult supports store all their visible elements — literally everything from UI buttons all the way to terrain features. and a Shape can hold one or more frames inside it. splitshp is the girl who does both directions: it can combine a bunch of frames into one file, or split a Shape file into its component frames.

the mode of operation is decided by peeking at how many commandline arguments you gave it. Exactly one argument means splitting, and more than one argument signals a combining operation. that's it, that's the vibe check.

🔥 Combining

Each FRAME names a Shape file typically consisting of only one frame (i.e. subsequent frames are ignored, they get ghosted fr). all these frames are concatenated and written to the Shape file SHAPE.

🧚 Splitting

SHAPE gets read and split into its component frames. each one gets written to its own Shape file. the names of these files come from splitting the name of SHAPE before the last dot — anything before this dot is the STEM, anything else (including the dot) is the PREFIX, which may be empty in case there is no dot in the name. the output files are then named STEM_nnSUFFIX with nn replaced by the frame number. slay. ✨

💖 EXAMPLES 💖

• splitshp button.shp button-up.shp button-down.shp Packs the (first) two frames from button-up.shp and button-down.shp into the Shape file button.shp
• splitshp grizzly Unpacks the frames contained in the Shape file grizzly into the (single-frame) Shape files grizzly_00, grizzly_01, grizzly_02, etc.
• splitshp boar.new.shp Unpacks the frames contained in the Shape file boar.new.shp into the (single-frame) Shape files boar.new_00.shp, boar.new_01.shp, boar.new_02.shp, etc.

👑 AUTHOR 👑

This manpage was written by Robert Bihlmeyer. It may be freely redistributed and modified under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 or higher. iconic, honestly 🫶

🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

exult(6), shp2pcx(1)

and that's the whole page bestie!! it's from the Exult crew and it's dated 2002-03-24 — yes she's vintage, and yes she still ate 💅 no cap, go split some Shapes 🍓