Since editing SPK parallax layers can be very tedious and annoying adding & dragging & dropping 1 star at a time, I made a quick tool to help make the process a lot easier. You just draw your parallax layers directly in your favorite image editing program, save each layer as a bitmap, and then use this tool compile them directly to an SPK. This program also provides the added benefit that large images will automatically be broken up in to 8x8 chunks to prevent flickering and refresh issues in StarCraft.



This is currently a beta build so it is still missing a few features I would like to add:
- Removing duplicate sub-images (currently detects duplicate images, but not sub-images)
- Specifying the WPE filename when decompiling
- Changing/specifying the maximum number of layers (currently it is SC's maximum of 5)
- Changing the layer dimensions (currently SC's size of 648x488).

Download!

As always, please leave questions, comments, suggestion and death threats.

Just as an add on Farty's OP.

This is a very great tool I have been using this to create what would otherwise be a very complex SPK file with little to no effort on the actual SC side.

Just to give you some examples the stuff this allows you to easily do is stuff like this:



The process of creating SPKs like this truly cannot be easier now.
Just grab a fullsized layer image (or several, depending on how many layers you want) and shove them up the .exe and it automatically generates all the stars by breaking down your big image into small stars and assigning them their positions in the spk file for you.

The output of the program is a .spk and the input is, ideally, 5 huge 648px x 488px bmp images. Already palleted for GameColor. And done.

For example here is a very short tutorial on this:

1. I firstly grabbed a couple reference stuff by googling "Nebula".


2. When I found pictures or details I liked I composited them into a single picture on photoshop, like this:


3. I broke down the image/nebula parts and features into layers I desired and filled the background with black, like this:


4. You then export each of your layers into a SC-Palleted bmp and have your layers set up as layer_1.bmp, layer_2.bmp... select them and drag them into the .exe as such:


5. Enjoy your results:



Thanks Farty, for making another great tool!

looks cool!

Oh man, this is great work!