The cast editor
editors/casts.html — source editors/cst-editor.ts. Open http://localhost:5173/editors/casts.html.
The other half of a character: the puppet editor has the brains, this has the body. Load a CST cast — GANG.CST is the 25 named story characters, EXTRA.CST the background passengers — and it comes apart into members → poses → sprites.
What it shows
| Part | What you can do with it |
|---|---|
| a member | pick one and rename them. This is a lookup key — actorpose/sendtoactor, and a SET's actor marks, all reach a character by this name — so renaming a story character means renaming them across the corpus |
| their poses | stand, walk, standlj…, filterable, each badged stand (a one-step play script) or cycle (more), with its step count, view count, sprite count and how many slots have no art behind them. Rename one: actorpose() matches it lowercased and falls back to pose 0, so a typo freezes an actor rather than crashing them |
| the sprite grid | the selected pose as rows of steps × its stored views (0 = facing the viewer). Usually eight around the compass — stok1 stores nine and life1 seventeen, both across the half circle only, so the grid is as wide as the pose is. A view with no art shows as a dash rather than silently falling back the way the runtime does |
| the preview | an actor is a world-space sprite: it draws at its projected world point minus its stored offset, both scaled by k = actorscale × refScale / (1000 × depth) (ActorRuntime.rect). The cross is that world point and k is a field, so the two effects can be seen apart — at k=0.5 the figure is half the size and half as far below the cross, which is why feet stay on the floor at any distance. The canvas is the 512×384 screen plus however far the pose reaches outside it, with the overhang filled flatter and darker and the screen's own edge outlined where it falls: a cast sprite is anchored at the actor's feet, so its stored offset is very nearly its full height (GANG.CST's tallest frame is 392 px with the anchor at 383, against a world point at y=300), and at k=1 the head used to be above y=0 where the canvas simply ended — 83 px of it, and 71 for EXTRA.CST. The overhang is measured over the whole pose, not the frame on show, so stepping or walking a cycle does not resize the canvas between frames |
| ▶ Walk the cycle | cycles the pose's steps in the selected direction at the 50 ms service tick, looping — which is what a walk does: the scheduler advances the step every tick for as long as the walk runs |
| a sprite | its stored offset, its depicted angle (direction × 32 in the engine's 0..255 space) and its refScale; export it as a transparent PNG, or replace it — one direction of one step at a time, which is the granularity the file stores |
| the scripts and palette | every member's script (setupactor/idle/mousedown), decompiled on demand, and the file's own 256 colours |
The eight directions are positions, not camera angles
Which of the eight sprites you see is not a function of where the camera looks but of where it stands: the runtime takes the actor's facing relative to the bearing from the actor to the camera. So the grid's directions are what a viewer sees from eight positions around a character, not eight camera angles.
Exporting
Export .cst repacks the container file and downloads it. Both names are copy-on-write patches on the member's own logic container (patchMemberName, patchPoseName in src/df/cst.ts), and a sprite's anchor goes through patchFrameAnchor in src/df/shp.ts — a cast sprite is a SHP frame, header and all — so everything you did not touch is the byte it was (see tests/auto/cst-editor.ts).
See also
- PUP & CST — characters ("puppets") — what the structures are
- Characters — actors in the world
- The puppet editor — the other half of a character
- The browser editors — what the seven pages share