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[happymonster]

A dozen??

Wow!

Why do you keep restarting? :D

[happymonster]

Kasumi: I've had a look, but I can't even seem to select a non 32bit screenmode in windows on my laptop to test with D-Pixel..

[Kasumi]

I've worked in both SDL and SDL2, but have only done advanced image stuff (loading/displaying NES chr files for a map editor) in standard SDL. I don't recall doing anything special to make it work on my computer and others. I don't know enough about SDL2 to guess what might be causing it when doing advanced image things. For what it's worth, the latest version loads and displays the GUI properly, but crashes slightly after "loading workspace" is displayed in 16 bit color. The first version I tried seemed to crash on boot.

But I wouldn't bother looking into it, especially if you have no way to set to 16bit screen mode yourself. It was just an example of silly "only-me" things I should build my own program for. Tiles being detected as the same when using different palettes is another example. Only matters for old games, which most people don't make anymore.

[surt]

Why do you keep restarting? :D

Grow bored, get the shits with a seemingly unsolvable bug, bang against a platform limitation, scope running wild, terrible practice of never finishbing one part before I move on to another, etc.

Kasumi: you're tempting me to start work on a NES-specific map tool that I will abandon shortly after starting.

[Kasumi]

surt: I remember one of your previous attempts. I somehow managed to miss that it was open source. I see another repository has been created. I'll mess with it if it gets somewhere. I'll continue messing with D-Pixel. For some reason unrelated even to my want of tile software, I've ended up testing very many painting and pixel programs over the years.

Even with Pyxel Edit, at worst I just keep in mind how many tiles are "the same" so I know when it says 258, I'm still okay when everything is made 4 colors. The only truly bad thing about it is no block copy, which d-pixel solves. Lots of things are SO CLOSE to perfect!

Besides so many things being close, what stops me from really making one is not wanting to implement all the drawing stuff... undo... zoom. There's a lot of "standard" things that would take a while to implement that have nothing to do with the real goal, so I wonder if I'll really gain more time than I lose. Hacking it into something is probably the best option, but learning a new codebase is also time. Making an art app is something that appeals to me, but not until the game is done.

I spent the time making a map tool because something like Tiled could not tell me how many unique screens, 32x32 and 16x16 regions I'm using (across levels even). Keeping track in head is impossible, and going over the limit for any of that is catastrophic. So in that case I did gain more time than I'd have lost not having the tool.

I feel very off topic, now.

[happymonster]

If it crashes after Loading workspace in 16bit colour it's probably when the canvas is trying to be drawn on the screen. It probably needs the textures to be set to 16bit and some colour conversion happening. Again though, no way to test on my PC.

Oh, I will add the number of tiles to the status bar when over a tile, that's easy enough to do.

You are both not wrong, doing a paint program seems quite easy, but it takes so much more work than I thought to implement all the basic stuff, and then deal with bugs and polish things so they work nicely.

Luckily for me, by now most of the basics are in there for D-Pixel and it's more the nicer extra bits to add. But it's taken a long while to get to this point, especially with a family and a day job

[happymonster]

I have a more experimental build that needs testing..

It adds the ability to draw over more than one tile location and have all the affected tiles mapped to other parts of the images. It can't cope with combining multiple changes to the same tile, so it just keeps the last edit it finds.


The main new feature though is something I've added to the tile mapping screen called 'tile palette' to deal with working with tile graphics with different palettes. You can turn this on/off and set the numbers of colours per tile palette to be 2, 4, 8 or 16. I've done some very quick icons and shoved them on the tilemap icon bar - the rainbow palette icon represents the tile palette mode on/off (I'll have to do another icon to avoid confusion with the normal palette, but for now it was just to get something working..)

Tile palettes are assumed to follow each other, so every 4 colours is a different palette in 4 tile colour mode. You can have as many palettes as fits into the 256 colour palette though.

When the tile palette mode is enabled and the rainbow palette icon is lit up then it has the following effects:

• Tiles with the same data but with a different palette are removed from the tileset (and the total count adjusted down). This should help when working to total tile limits.

• If you draw changes onto a tile, then any matching tile will have the changes mapped to it as normal. However, if the tile is the same and in a different location but with a different tile palette then the changes are applied in that tile's palette, and not the one for the tile you are drawing in.

• In reverse, if you draw in tiles with colours from a different tile palette, then the whole of that tile is changed to the new palette.

It still needs some refining and perhaps some changes, but I think it might be helpful when working with tile limitations for those who like doing NES work, etc..

If you want to test and feedback some ideas to improve it, let me know about bugs, that would be helpful.
http://www.retroidea.com/D-Pixel-Test.zip

[Kasumi]

Tile palette probably shouldn't be on by default (weird coming from me, eh?). If I open a file and just do a fill, some colors might change that might confuse a new user. (If it IS the default. I feel like it was when I started the program and started this post, but I may have just immediately switched it on and now I don't remember.)


Same previous 8x8 tiled image I sent:

I'm not 100% sure why, but sometimes fill just... doesn't want to work. I'll click, the pixel color will change which indicates that my click was "accepted", but the fill doesn't actually happen. I'm not sure what the conditions are that cause it (and if you can't reproduce, I'll try to think of something), but it's actually happening to me more often than not.

This also happens regardless of tile palette being on or tile mapping being on. "I'm-not-crazy" gif:

The single pixel white left behind is odd too. I guess it's possible that's a white pixel from any of the million different white indices in that image. But, it's not a rendering problem. I checked after the gif. Color picker picks it up as white, scrolling it off screen, then rerendering the scene doesn't fix it. That was with both tile mapping and tile palette off.

I managed to crash(?) the program by doing a fill on the white part that mostly encompasses the image with tilemapping on. It may not have crash-crashed, but the operation took long enough that Windows told me the program was not responding, and the time I gave it after "wait for program to respond" was too long so I killed the process. There's a lot of workarounds for what I was planning, and I understand the why of this operation taking forever, but fill tool's a problem right now.

The program actually seems to be a little unaware if the new tile palette stuff is off or on? I turn it off. I use the range brush on a tile. What I expect to get is that tile (and all others like it) to be made the 4 colors I'm in "range" of like previous versions. By turning tile palette on, I expect just that tile to get the 4 colors I'm in "range" of, while all the tiles like it stay their color.

Right now, regardless of if tile palette is on or off, I get the behavior I want only when it's on. (just that tile to get the 4 colors I'm in "range" of, while all the tiles like it stay their color.)

All in all, while rough, you're generally beating Pyxel Edit for my silly use cases. I'll spend a little more time with it, but that's the initial impression. Tile palette and range painting are too cool.

Edit: Edited this so that "tile palette" is used instead of "rainbow palette". I just got confused by Pro Motion's previous use of Tile Palette. (Don't change your own name for the feature. What Pro Motion used palette for in that instance is silly, I think.)

[surt]

Not being able to draw across multiple of the same tile seems to rather defeat the purpose. That way it can't help with seamless tiling.

Matching colour variant of a tile is cool.

It'd be cool if the tile palette displayed the tiles with the currently selected palette range like NES Screen Tool does.

[happymonster]

First, thanks both of you for testing! 

Kasumi:
I had the tile palette on by default for testing, it wouldn't be on normally

There is definitely something wrong with the fill there.. something else to look at. Especially when tile mapping is on. 

The program actually seems to be a little unaware if the new tile palette stuff is off or on? I turn it off. I use the range brush on a tile. What I expect to get is that tile (and all others like it) to be made the 4 colors I'm in "range" of like previous versions. By turning tile palette on, I expect just that tile to get the 4 colors I'm in "range" of, while all the tiles like it stay their color.

Right now, regardless of if tile palette is on or off, I get the behavior I want only when it's on. (just that tile to get the 4 colors I'm in "range" of, while all the tiles like it stay their color.)

I'll have to look at this.

Surt:

Not being able to draw across multiple of the same tile seems to rather defeat the purpose. That way it can't help with seamless tiling.

I know. I have to add code to try to combine edits.

It'd be cool if the tile palette displayed the tiles with the currently selected palette range like NES Screen Tool does.

At the moment the tile palette is drawn from the tiles in the main image. To do the palette range idea I'd have to create a separate image for the tiles. That's not too difficult to do, just a different way of doing it

[happymonster]

The program actually seems to be a little unaware if the new tile palette stuff is off or on? I turn it off. I use the range brush on a tile. What I expect to get is that tile (and all others like it) to be made the 4 colors I'm in "range" of like previous versions. By turning tile palette on, I expect just that tile to get the 4 colors I'm in "range" of, while all the tiles like it stay their color.

Right now, regardless of if tile palette is on or off, I get the behavior I want only when it's on. (just that tile to get the 4 colors I'm in "range" of, while all the tiles like it stay their color.)

You did have the tiles link on didn't you? I've tried this and it seems to work ok.


I'm concerned that the behaviour when tile mapping and tile palettes is on isn't intuitive to you or me, that suggests an issue with the design. But I'm not sure how to fix it at the moment.. 

[Kasumi]

Hmmm... try again in the morning... it works. I'm pretty sure tile mapping was on...   Well, carry on, unless I can find what I did.

Edit: Minor annoyance, though. If you hold control and move over the left panel (with palette/paint options) or the right panel (with tiles/tile palette options) you can't click anything with the eyedropper (even after you've released control). While looking for whatever I did, I was control+z-ing and occasionally couldn't click the thing due to the eyedropper icon.

[happymonster]

Thinking about it some more I think I'm going to have to create a tilemap image and combine the old tiles with the new drawing actions as they happen. That should also solve the problem with the speed of the fill tool where it results in every filled tile trying to be mapped to every other tile, etc..

[happymonster]

After working out the best way to do this I realised I was doing it in a very inefficient manner.

I've redesigned the tilemapping, and now it lets you edit the same tile(s) across a drawing operation, and is much much faster when applying large amount of tile changes (such as when filling an area).

I've also fixed the holding down control bug, and I think the fill bug as well as some other issues I found.

If someone could please test to see the new tilemapping works ok before a proper release that would be a great help!

http://www.retroidea.com/D-Pixel-Test.zip

[surt]

Just had a quick play on my baby tablet pc. Mostly working fine so far.
Only issue I've found is glitching with tile palette mode on. First stroke and it modified all the right tiles but left horizontal lines through all of them, further strokes only updated the tiles directly under the stoke, leaving duplicates unchanged.

[happymonster]

Damn, I thought I'd fixed that bug.. ok, back to hunting that one down!

[happymonster]

When you said horizontal lines, did you also mean that the lines were in the correct tile palette, or in the wrong palette for the rest of that tile?

If you have a screenshot that would help.

[surt]

Trying on my desktop can't get the exact same problem but a similar one: http://img.uninhabitant.com/Screenshot_2015-11-26_04-40-13.png
Tile palette mode on.
Colour range mode on.
Setting the tile the cursor is over to the grey subpalette, the blue horizontal pixel appear on the brown dirt tiles.

[happymonster]

Thanks for the screenshot Surt. That gives me something to go on in tracking it down 

[happymonster]

I've updated the zip file with a new exe which I'm hoping should fix that bug.. (if not then it at least fixes another one!)

Could you please try again when you have time?