Talking about backdrop editing

Lets talk about editing Backdrops!

Personally, I am totally happy to edit them in external programs and import them, but this isn't a happy workflow for some people.

I would like to learn more about how people currently work with backdrops, and how they think this process could be made easier.

Personally I use Backdrops to make fullscreen animations both with and without transparency. I also draw and import backdrops from Photoshop which interconnect to create a very large map. The reason I do this is to create maps which have little to no repetition, thus making my games maps more organic feeling. Most of what I do with backdrops involves manipulating them as slices which I can either arrange in a map area, or animate on screen.

Having such a feature would allow me to eliminate my need for Photoshop. Photoshop is a nice program but it lacks keyboard support and 20x20 tile editing, which are both features I am more comfortable dealing with. Not to mention that everytime I import a map's backdrops, I have to divide/crop the map in to 320x200 screens and then import them all seperately.

I would prefer to do all my graphics within Custom and use photoshop only for strange effects that can only be pulled off with an advanced editor.

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⊕ P E R S O N A L M U S I C: https://open.spotify.com/album/6fEo3fCm5C3XhtFRflfANr
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I either use MS paint or the maptile editor with exporting and importing stuff to do my backgrounds anymore. It gets annoying at times, but it's the best thing I've got to make the palettes match.

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dOn'T MiNd mE! i'M jUsT CoNtAgIoUs!!!
Play Orbs CCG: http://orbsccg.com/r/4r6x

Here's the main reason I would want this feature.
So, whenever I'm importing a backdrop I have to go through a sort of trial and error process, because I have to see if the backdrop actual imports it's colors correctly. This seems to be a common problem for OHR users. People consistently have odd colors in their backdrops, like tans that have turned grey or even reds that are now green. There's also transparency and having to go back and get those right. Being able to simply go in and use a fill feature to quickly fix the backdrop could not only save tons and tons of time but also improve the quality of most OHR games.

@Spoonweaver: Good call, that totally happens to me sometimes too.

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⊕ P E R S O N A L M U S I C: https://open.spotify.com/album/6fEo3fCm5C3XhtFRflfANr
⍠ C O L L A B M U S I C: https://dustpuppets.bandcamp.com/releases

I've had too many instances when two shades of green are in some grass, one shade for tall and other for short, and it imports the tall grass' shading as vomit-yellow.

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dOn'T MiNd mE! i'M jUsT CoNtAgIoUs!!!
Play Orbs CCG: http://orbsccg.com/r/4r6x

Bahahahah so true.

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⊕ P E R S O N A L M U S I C: https://open.spotify.com/album/6fEo3fCm5C3XhtFRflfANr
⍠ C O L L A B M U S I C: https://dustpuppets.bandcamp.com/releases

I know the newest nightly had some features related to this, which I discovered too late in the process to really test, but one issue with backdrops right now is transparency. For the Review Picker, I had a lot of black backdrops with an 80x50 "transparent" hole in the middle, which also had to be black and finding the right numbers to set each one to so the game would recognize it as transparent was a nightmare. I'm also wording this complaint terribly, no idea what I'm trying to say.

You're saying that some black colors were transparent and some transparent spots were black, am I correct?

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dOn'T MiNd mE! i'M jUsT CoNtAgIoUs!!!
Play Orbs CCG: http://orbsccg.com/r/4r6x

Which program are you making the backdrops in before importing?

When I use photoshop I just make 2 layers, one with the graphics and transparency, and one which is blank underneath. That way when you save the image as a .bmp the transparent area of the image will become black (#ffffff I think). This should be the same for most similar like gimp, etc... If you're using paint just make the background magenta (or some similar unused color) then choose that color as the transparency color in the editor. If you use a color like magenta which stands out, then a difference between background colors should be more noticeable.

Also in photoshop (and probably gimp) there is a color selection tool which can select all the black in the image and replace it with the proper black you are wanting.

Hope that helps. I've never really had that problem but I can see how it would really suck.

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⊕ P E R S O N A L M U S I C: https://open.spotify.com/album/6fEo3fCm5C3XhtFRflfANr
⍠ C O L L A B M U S I C: https://dustpuppets.bandcamp.com/releases

IIRC the ability to easily change what gets imported as transparent only applies to 16 colour sprites.



Remind me; if you're still editing your backdrops as 20x20 pieces does that mean that what you actually want is larger tilesets?

Recently I was looking at adding the libimagequant library to Custom to handle the conversion of bmps from true colour to 256 colour palettes. It would produce far better results than the current conversion, which is done in a very simple and stupid way. But honestly the better solution is just to support using 24 bit colour backdrops directly.

I'm completely against editing backdrops as 20x20 tiles; that's too hacky and useless to nearly everyone. However since we have to overhaul/largely rewrite the sprite and tile editors anyway, we could add backdrop editing capability to the new tile editor. We want the ability to edit portions of the tileset larger than 20x20 anyway. Just add the ability to zoom in to portions of the image, aligned on tile boundaries by default, and the same editor can be used for both.

I'm not sure that's accurate. I *think* I accidentally imported a graphic without a color that was 0,0,0 RGB, and it asked me what I wanted to use as transparent. I'd have to check to be sure and I'm really lazy and it doesn't matter.

Well yes. Larger tilesets would be nice. For my purposes they'd have to be sufficiently larger so as to give a lot of creative freedom.

If this is a feature you were going to add in anyways then thats great, don't feel you have to do it for me though, my methods workable.

You're right in saying that 20x20 editing is hacky. A zoom feature would be cool like you say. Or perhaps a tool which allows you to select a rectangle of tiles (for example: 20x20, 40x40, 20x60... etc...). It could be like a click and drag tool which opens up a tile-range and allows the user to work on it. I'm sure your zoom idea may be better, I'm just not sure what you have in mind.

Also when you speak about possibly supporting 24 bit color backdrops, are you meaning that the engine would support the full color range internally without need for a limited master pallette. If so, that would be amazing. It'd at least save me having to import so many master palettes in to my game for different areas.

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⊕ P E R S O N A L M U S I C: https://open.spotify.com/album/6fEo3fCm5C3XhtFRflfANr
⍠ C O L L A B M U S I C: https://dustpuppets.bandcamp.com/releases

Oh, you actually use multiple master palettes? That's almost unheard of. Do you keep part of the master palette the same for use by hero sprites? Or do you have multiple versions of all the sprites too?

Higher bitdepth has been the plan for such a long time (Jay was working on it years ago). I'm terrible at prioritising important stuff :(



Oh, you're right. I had to look at the code to figure out what I actually did. If you import an 8 bit bmp as backdrop/tileset that doesn't match the current master palette then you're only given the choice to do a nearest-colour remapping. In that case colour 0 always gets mapped to colour 0 to preserve the transparent parts (this can be a problem if they backdrop/tileset isn't meant to be transparent). But if you import a higher bitdepth bmp then you get to pick which colour should be made transparent.

I actually like the workflow more or less within Custom, which is one of my main reasons for sticking with this program. I think a backdrop editor would be cool if it functioned more or less the same as the maptile editor, but I would like to suggest a few changes.

*if you could select multiple tiles to edit (up to a maximum of 80x80 or whatever the largest sprite is) it would be much easier to draw larger things. Sometimes I don't realize I haven't lined something up properly and have to go into two separate tiles to make sure I got it right. Sounds like a minor nitpick, but it ends up taking a lot more time then I feel it should.

*eyedropper tool, please!

*you can't "undo" copying and pasting in the maptile editor.