TisPack consists of two utilities, tispack and tisunpack. They convert TIS files to and from the TIZ format, described in tizformat.html. Typically mod authors will pack the finished TIS files with tispack, and then ship tisunpack together with the TIZ files and an installer. The TIZ files need to be unpacked before they can be used by the game engine.
In our tests, very little image quality was lost in the conversion, especially with the quality cranked up a bit to 85. However, by using a 24-bit source for the tiles instead of a TIS file (that has 8-bit tiles) it should be possible to get slightly better image quality and slightly better compression. For this to work the area editors would need to support TIZ files natively, and not save the tiles as TIS files first.
Usage:
tispack [-s] [-q quality] [-o outfile.tiz] infile.tis
Arguments:
| -s | Be silent. Supply twice for really silent. |
| -q quality | Set the compression quality, between 1-100. With quality 1-99 lossy compression is used, with quality 100 non-lossy compression is used. The default is 75. |
| -b blur | Set the amount of blur used with lossy compression, between 1-100. The default is no blur. Blurred input compresses better, but doesn't look as good. |
| -o outfile.tiz | Select output file. The default is <infile>.tiz. |
Example:
C:\>tispack -s -q 85 ar9999.tis Packing 140 tiles in ar9999.tis to ar9999.tiz packed 102 tiles with method 0, 10 tiles with method 1, 28 tiles with method 2 output size: 46976 bytes (7.1%)
ar9999.tis is compressed with lossy compression at quality 85 (-q 85), and the program is less chatty (-s).
Usage:
tisunpack [-s] [-f] [-o outfile.tis] infile.tiz
Arguments:
| -s | Be silent. Supply twice for really silent. |
| -h | Don't write the 24-byte tis header. |
| -f | Force overwrite of existing output file. |
| -d | Dither 24-bit tiles. This should probably not be used if the source images were already dithered. |
| -o outfile.tis | Select output file. The default is <infile>.tis. |
Example:
C:\>tisunpack -s ar9999.tiz ar9999.tiz already exists, use -f to force overwrite. C:\>tisunpack -s -o ar9999-q85.tis ar9999.tiz Unpacking 140 tiles in ar9999.tiz to ar9999-q85.tis unpacked 102 files with method 0, 10 tiles with method 1, 28 tiles with method 2
ar9999.tiz is unpacked to ar9999-q85.tis (with -o), and again we make it less chatty (-s).
I wrote this utility for Jason Compton, jcompton@xnet.com. If you have any questions regarding usage, modding, or anything else regarding the games, please contact him - I don't even own any of these games. If you have found bugs or wish to submit improvements to the code, you can contact me, Per Olofsson, at MagerValp@cling.gu.se.