Sprite editor

[Asmusr]

There are many sprite editors around, e.g. Beryl <http://sometimes.pla...ryl.html>, but can somebody recommend one that allows you to save your work and open it later? Multi-color layers and support for animations/frames would also be nice to have. Thanks.

[Willsy]

Are you looking for something that runs on the TI?

 

If so, may I humbly recommend my own Sprite Editor program?

 

 

 

It's downloadable from planet-99.net (just do a search for sprite editor) - I have no idea how to transfer it to a real TI - but you could just run it on an emulator. You can load and save with it. It saves the data as hex, so it's very easy to write a simple loader in BASIC to load the definitions in to your program as strings.

[Willsy]

Ah, sorry, I didn't realise you were looking for multi-color, which would imply non-TI I guess. Maybe Magellan would be better for you?

[sometimes99er]

You could consider using a GIF animation tool. There should be many out there, both free, old and web-based. I use one called Animation Shop 2. It was part of a package now owned by Corel, I think, called Paint Shop Pro. It dates back to 1999. I should do a tool for transferring a GIF directly into assembler data statements. What I did however, was to save frames as individual images and bulk convert. Here’s a tiny little demo of the tool in some sort of action. Also I’d like to mention that Adobe CS2 has been free from time to time this year and seems to work fine with Wine. GIMP also has an Animation Package and scripting capabilities.

 

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B29jDJ0bmrw

[unhuman]

I can self-promote too:

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/163880-my-sprite-editor-try-it-out-updated-layering/#entry2023394

 

Also, make sure you check out the development resources for a complete list of (almost) everything:

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/153704-ti-994a-development-resources/

[Asmusr]

I can self-promote too:

http://atariage.com/...g/#entry2023394

 

Thanks, I already tried your editor and it's great, but how do you save your work and come back to it later. Do you need to copy and paste, or is there something obvious that I'm missing?

[Asmusr]

I use one called Animation Shop 2. It was part of a package now owned by Corel, I think, called Paint Shop Pro.

 

I actually have a licensed version of Animation Shop 3 that I was thinking about using, but I wanted to know if there was something out there that could generate assembler statements directly. How did you do the bulk converting?

[sometimes99er]

How did you do the bulk converting?

 

Saving frames (one menu item, one go, individual files numbered consecutively). Console C# looping the files reading images into memory (knew how, can't remember if I looked for animated images) and extracting hex strings (for use with XB at the time). Output in one file.

 

[unhuman]

Yeah, you paste the hex in... IIRC you can paste a larger amount of hex in and it'll work its magic, but maybe that was just a future idea. It's open source so if you want to make changes, you may - and I'll include them. If anyone really wants to do stuff, I can create a project on github or google code or....

 

Thanks, I already tried your editor and it's great, but how do you save your work and come back to it later. Do you need to copy and paste, or is there something obvious that I'm missing?

Edited May 17, 2013 by unhuman

[Asmusr]

Saving frames (one menu item, one go, individual files numbered consecutively). Console C# looping the files reading images into memory (knew how, can't remember if I looked for animated images) and extracting hex strings (for use with XB at the time). Output in one file.

I guess I could do something similar in Java. Have you considered adding color support to Grapefruit?

 

BTW, how do you make those GIF screen captures from Classic99 that I have seen you have posted (e.g. the one in the smooth scrolling thread)?

[sometimes99er]

Have you considered adding color support to Grapefruit?

 

Yep. I’ve thought about that a few times, but then, as far as I remember, nobody has ever asked.

 

Here and there the TI palette is implemented with different RGBA values and may be out of order (compared with the original). Not so long ago I tried and load a color character image with Magellan and it messed up badly. I could have sorted things out by looking at the Magellan source code, but as a user, I’d had to grap (extract) the palette of Magellan, convert my input image to fit and try again.

 

Of course I would like this to be automated, but I soon realized that this was not necessarily an easy task - as far as I could see. As said the order of colors could be mixed up, the number of colors could be less than 16 or 15 for that matter, or why not more than 16 colors. Transparency is also something not to completely ignore. What if you find 2 shades of gray, 2 shades of magenta or perhaps 2 shades of cyan. It’s easy to come up with quick solutions, and they might work, but there are cases where joining to shades of gray into one will lose vital detail. The easy formula is to reject any image not confirming with the standard of the tool.

 

Any image with 16 colors or less, could maybe suggest a conversion, so you at least know what was going to happen. Maybe even the option of user redistribution of colors.

 

Maybe we could have a community standard, or a set of palettes, a transparency trade and/or an algorithm to go from any colors.

 

 

BTW, how do you make those GIF screen captures from Classic99 that I have seen you have posted (e.g. the one in the smooth scrolling thread)?

 

I grap from Classic99 using Camtasia Studio (auto snaps to the right inner area), edit and produce video as GIF animation. Sometimes I then use Animation Shop to fine tune frame count or something. It may become compact and crisp compared with YouTube, but there are frame issues there too. It’s not just like that to get the smoothness of original VDP sync’d masterpieces.