dev thread

[shmibs]

there are a dozen and one sprite-makers out there, but useful tools for creating tile sets and and tile maps seemed much harder to come by. for this reason, i decided to make a single tool to cover, from start to finish, the process of drawing tiles, creating tile maps, and exporting that data in a format that can be inserted directly into programs on-calc. this is also sort of for my own benefit, to try and motivate myself to work on other projects

it isn't very complete thus far, but already has the basic outline of the tileset creator and exports a single tiles to Str0. it will have ten save slots for tilesets (0-9), saved to appvars that can be used in the tilemap creator, and each one can contain up to 256 tiles. if people think that isn't enough, i could add in custom naming of saved tilesets, but the other system is already mostly complete. there will also be copy/paste functions in both the editors. here is a screenie of the current gui:

right now the only available drawing function is turning on and off single pixels. what other things should it do? rotation? inverting everything? shift left-right? which things are actually functional and which are just pointless glitter?

[Sorunome]

Wha, it's quite nice!

[turiqwalrus]

Looks nice

are you planning on adding grayscale support anytime soon?

[Hayleia]

This can be really useful

(What is wrong with this topic ? I wanted to +1 you then I realized that no one has respect here )

[hellninjas]

I love it ;.;

Will this have animation previews?
Like a walking man or talking face of some sort?

[shmibs]

no, it's not made for animations. it's going to be a tool geared solely towards tilesets (although it could be used for quickly converting a sprite or two).

turiqwalrus: no, if i make a grey version it will probably be completely separate, after the program is completely finished, or at the very least add it in at the end.

hayleia: i have no clues. i probably did something dumb when making the new board.

oh, and i finalised the gui (unless someone has a better idea for "not used yet" sprite tiles. that was sort of just haphazardly tossed over there.) and wrote a text input routine, so the stored data can be exported into appvars or programs of the user's choosing. screenies!



oh, and a question: what type number do appvars have in the VAT? programs are 5, right?

[squidgetx]

iirc appvars are 11...I think you can actually convert the appv token into the right number. Protected programs are 6.

This looks nice so far. I think shift left/right/up/down would be good as well as mirror/invert function.

[DJ Omnimaga]

Looks great. One thing I would like to see in the future in your tile creator, though, is the ability to create the following kind of maps (and the tiles required to create them):



Kinda like water in RPG Maker.

[shmibs]

ooh, that would be rather useful. i'd forgotten about it.

and squidget, i made a program to check, and it looks like appvars are 21

[DJ Omnimaga]

If you add that type of tile, would it be hard to allow someone to use both static and dynamic tiles in one tilemap? It would have two kind of data basically so I worry about map display speed, but I thought it would be cool.

[squidgetx]

Lol, off by 10 Oh well

[leafy]

The most efficient way to generate dynamic tiles is usually not having a separate tile for every case, so I don't know how you would handle that. Great work as usual, though

[shmibs]

efficient in terms of what? i know that you could split each tile into 4 sub tiles, each with three possible states, to decrease the total data required from 128 to 24 bytes, but that would slow things down a load-tonn.
anyways, i think i'm just going to finish what i had in mind and worry about this after.
also, would exporting to matrix for maps and Pic for tilesets be worth adding in for xLib/Celtic users?

* shmibs isn't sure how matrices store their data, and it would decrease the maximum export size by quite a bit.

[DJ Omnimaga]

It would be nice indeed, since some people might prefer to go the hybrid route. Just make sure to not forget grammer too. Matrices usually have no data storage standard. It is usually numbers from 0 to 96 or something.

[apcalc]

This looks nice, great work shmibs!