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[happymonster]

Thanks

If you can come up with a better program name than Tixel Editor, then please let me know!

[Kenney]

Tixel sounds good to me, I'm assuming it's tile(s) + pixel? Makes sense, sounds good - go for it!

[pmprog]

Wow, you seemed to have made quite a bit of progress since I last looked at this.
Screenshot looks good, and I can't wait to give this a whirl

[happymonster]

Cheers! I hope to have something for people to try out tomorrow or Tuesday.

[happymonster]

Tixel version 0.5 (ALPHA)

By Richard Phipps, 15th December 2014

I am very pleased to announce the release of Version 0.5 (ALPHA) of Tixel. This is a paint program / editor that uses coloured and rotated shapes instead of pixels. This gives you some of the advantages of vectors while still letting you draw as you would in a bitmap based paint program.

Currently you can display and save Tixel images with scaling between x1 - x64 of the original size.

As this is an Alpha release there may well be crashes, annoying bugs, and missing or broken functionality. Please be aware of this when using the program! This version is primarily to be used for testing and seeing what needs fixing, adding or changing.

There are tool tips and other help displayed on the screen when running, but full documentation for the program will appear in the future as this program is developed further.

You can load the example.tixi file to see a basic example of what you can do with Tixel.

TIPS:

* To scroll around the canvas you can use the arrow keys or hold down the middle mouse button when moving the mouse over the canvas. You can also alter the scaling by either clicking on the scaling slider bar, pressing + or - on the keyboard or scrolling the mouse wheel with Left Alt held down when over the canvas.

* Saving a Tixel image as a PNG bitmap will use the scaling factor you have set for the display. So you can alter this to export in any of the different sizes.


This program is free to use and distribute and the Tixel files and resulting bitmap images are free for you to use in whatever form you see fit (whether free or commercial)

Thank you, and enjoy!
Richard

http://www.retroidea.com/Tixel_Release.zip

[happymonster]

Please post any artwork you do with Tixel!

[pmprog]

Some quick notes from my first play:

1. The window loads fullscreen, but the canvas/palette/tools aren't expanded, so I have a large chunk of empty space that I could be using in the canvas.

2. You need an Eraser tool to clear a tixel cell. Setting transparancy and drawing a full block seems a bit long-winded (Eraser should clear both layers too)

3. The Change Colour tool should only alter the colour on non-transparent blocks, IMO not set them to a full tixel

4. Drawing on the 2nd layer with a transparent brush over an empty tixel draws a gray block that is impossible to clear.

5. Could you add an option that lets me toggle the visiblity of the two layers (or at least allow me to only see the layer I'm editing)?


Those things aside, it looks pretty good so far. Keep up the good work

[happymonster]

Hiya,

Thanks for the quick test:

1. Can you show me a screenshot? And what screen resolution you run windows in?

2. Yes I do need a dedicated tool, but have you tried the shortcut of right clicking on a solid non-transparent block?

3. I need a quick colour change tool which only changes the colour of the shape, as well as the existing method which lets you change the background colour or the shape depending on where your mouse pointer is over.

4. Will need to look at this.

5. Probably do need this.

[pmprog]

1. Can you show me a screenshot? And what screen resolution you run windows in?

1680x1050

2. Yes I do need a dedicated tool, but have you tried the shortcut of right clicking on a solid non-transparent block?

You still need to change the transparancy to 0% first; unless you can shortcut to 0%?

3. I need a quick colour change tool which only changes the colour of the shape, as well as the existing method which lets you change the background colour or the shape depending on where your mouse pointer is over.

Might just be me... I guess if you consider blank tiles as "full tiles" but with 0% opacity, I guess the colour changes makes sense.

4. Will need to look at this.

You should be able to see a few in the screenshot above

Thanks

Edit: Attempt to fix image

[happymonster]

1. Ah, the program doesn't have any code in it to deal with non-widescreen display ratios. That's why things are not bigger vertically yet.

2. If you right click on a solid tile it makes it transparent. If you are over a shape you click once to turn it solid and then again to go into erase mode and make it transparent.

3. I'll think about this.

4. Your screenshot was working earlier, but seems down now - will keep checking..

[pmprog]

1. Ah, the program doesn't have any code in it to deal with non-widescreen display ratios. That's why things are not bigger vertically yet.

Ah, okay

2. If you right click on a solid tile it makes it transparent. If you are over a shape you click once to turn it solid and then again to go into erase mode and make it transparent.

I'll give that a try when I get home

4. Your screenshot was working earlier, but seems down now - will keep checking..

I've reuploaded it, and updated the link

[happymonster]

Thanks, I'll look at fixing the grey block thing and make it show more of the canvas in non-widescreen modes in the next release.

[happymonster]

Smooth 3 x 5 font:

[pmprog]

Oh, the mouse wheel panning is really flakey. It jumps quite wildly, and the first time I did this, I thought it'd just erased my canvas.

Overall though, I like the tool. Shows some real promise.

Out of curiousity, how is the tixel library going to work? ie, say I wanted to plug this in to Allegro to load up my tixels

[happymonster]

Yeah, the panning and scrolling with arrow keys needs to work on a pixel based in the future. That's something I need to add in.

The Tixel library will let you load a tixel image and render it at a scale of x1-x64 and return an output data pointer to the raw 32 bpp data (as well as the width and height). From here you can copy it to a SDL Texture directly or an Allegro bitmap (I'm nor sure of the format conversion in the 5.0 branch)

I'm going to make it super-simple to use anyway

[happymonster]

I'm going away for Christmas on Thursday and although I'll have the internet I won't have much time for programming.

I will try and release a new version tomorrow though that fixes a few things that you've noticed.

I hope other people try it too, it would be nice if people start to use it!

[happymonster]

New release..
http://www.retroidea.com/tixel_release.zip

Changes
-------

Version 0.51 (Alpha):
* In non-widescreen screen resolutions the canvas window now fully extends vertically to allow more of the canvas to be displayed
* Stopped grey solid tixels being created when trying to draw a fully transparent shape on layer 2
* Implemented pixel based scrolling (instead of tixel based), now much smoother when scrolling with the arrow keys or when the middle mouse button is held down and the mouse moved
* Optimised solid shape tixel drawing, now at least twice as fast to draw for any solid shapes in the tixel image
* If a file extension is not typed in the file selector when saving Tixi or PNG files then this is now added when saving the file

[pmprog]

Nice, I'll try and give this a whirl over the weekend.

Sounds good on the library. Allegro lets you map the bits in any format you want (regardless of the actual format)

BTW - One thing I meant to ask, can you edit shapes and/or patterns? If not, is it a planned feature?

[happymonster]

I'm happy to add new tile shapes and patterns in where we have gaps. I can't easily replace an existing shape or pattern as it would break any existing tixel images.

So yes, we have quite a few free spaces for new shapes.

[surt]

So it's basically a faux-ASCII editor but with vector-based characters.
User defined character sets would be cool.

A limited palette, or at least a list of current colours in image would be cool.

You've got panning backwards again. If the cursor is moving while panning then it should move with the canvas. If you want inverted panning, then please lock the cursor screen position while doing so.

I see the real value for the scaling abilities of this in lying in mobile in which case I think you'd really want a geometry and/or shader-based OpenGL ES renderer.