Talking about backdrop editing

You can press enter while hovering over a colour to select that colour.

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

Yeah I do use multiple master palettes. Having a larger bit depth would be amazing! So far I've been keeping a section of the master palette reserved for the heroes. But this is kind of a pain as I only have 3 character currently which use 10 colors in total. Eventually as my character list expands, I foresee a lot of the master palette colors being reserved for characters which will lower my leftover colors for maptiles... In some cases I have alternate colors for the heroes because of it being night/daytime but even so, there is a reserved set of colors to accommodate this.

@crowtongue: Meow is right. There's been an "eyedropper" tool for as long as I remember. Just hover over the color you want to use the eyedropper on, then press enter/return on your keyboard. I guess it's kind of a hidden feature. Pretty sure I discovered it by accident once.

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Alternatively you can just right-click.

The eyedropper functionality in Custom is one of my favorite things about it as a pixel art program. I wish you could configure MSPaint to work that way...

ETA:



Yeah, I would absolutely love it if you could undo at this stage. Just in general, if you Ctrl+C/+V stuff on the preview screens (not just maptiles but all the individual sprite sheets, too, like Walkabouts, Heroes, Enemies, etc.), you are 100% out of luck if you make a mistake.

Many's the time I have Copy-Pasted myself right out of 20 minutes of work...

I do my graphics work in Grafx2. I like the spline tool plus the ability to do gradients.

And for maptiles, there's an option to have a grid visible while zoomed in.

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I'd be very happy about a backdrop editor.

Usually I'm lazy and I don't make fancy backdrops, but sometimes it get difficult.
I fail to import colorpallets to gimp.
Therefore creating some backdrops really was a lot of work, as I had to to go throug the 20x20 tiles to change and fill the colors manually (edit:) in the tilemap editor, than export as bmp and re-import a backdrop ...
It would be good not to have to do this again in the future.

Speaking of higher bit depth, I just though of another neat feature that may become possible once a higher bit depth is used in the engine. What I've always wanted is the ability to make pixels semi-transparent. At one point I was contemplating coding 1x1 pixel slice such that it would change it's colour to "1 shade darker" than the pixel color presented below it. This would make the slice look like it was semi-transparent as it's colour would be based on that of the colour below. In the end I couldn't figure out how to pull it off, and I abandoned the idea.

I think this idea would be much more possible with a higher bit depth because there would almost always be a colour darker than the one being displayed. It would allow this to become a plausible built in feature for the engine too. Imagine that you could choose the degree of transparency of each pixel. It would allow people to make cool effects like: have smoke and clouds which the player can see through, have glass windows that change the colour of your character when you are behind them, have a ghost character which is see-through, have more complexed looking water, and much more.

If this feature is ever considered, I also think it would be best if there was an option to make the 1x1 pixel, lighten the pixel below it too. Depending on the effect the user is wanting to pull off, this option may be better. Also script related functions would have to be added for pulling off certain things.

Anyways, this is just an idea. I bet it would be very hard to implement. I would be happy simply with the higher bit depth and backdrop editor, and I will continue to contemplate this concept.

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Personally, I wouldn't really have much use for a backdrop/screen editor. I already do all of my graphics in the GIMP and then import it.



As for this, I've never had any problems with colors changing. Well, sure, yeah, the first time I ever picked up the OHRRPGCE back I had that problem, but after learning how the colors are actually managed and all, I never had that problem again.

Hmm... Perhaps I should write a mini-tutorial "How to make sure your colors work right" or something like that. It's fairly easy, as long as you're not using something like MS Paint.

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Being from the third world, I reserve the right to speak in the third person.

Using Editor version wip 20170527 gfx_sdl+fb music_sdl

Hey now! Nothing wrong with MSPaint (other than everything that's wrong with it).

My workaround for the color issue in Paint is to export an image of the master palette I'm using for my game, copy-paste it into the image I'm currently working on and to then use the eyedropper tool exclusively when selecting colors. If you only use colors from that palette, you can save it as a 24-bit BMP and the colors are exactly what you'd expect after importing.

I'm quite amused. You missed that the main reason for moving to a higher bitdepth is that we can add alpha transparency. Also, what you described are additive and subtractive blending modes.

Incidentally, it is actually possible to have (limited) transparency using a 256 colour palette, as was done in the Quake 2 (and Quake 1?) software renderer.

Today I've been working on improved remap of 24/32 bit BMPs to the master palette. I started by fixing 32 bit BMP support. Unfortunately it turns out libimagequant isn't able to do that, but I'll try to reuse some of its code for edge-preserving dithering.

Cool, so do you think diferent degrees of transparency will ever be a feature further in the future?

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There are two rules:
1. The rule of computers: everything is possible
2. The rule of humans: everything is done slowly

In the hypothetical situation that James and I work on the engine forever, every feature will be added eventually. The only reason I have any hope of getting transparency in is that it is so obviously deserving.

Your question reminded me that I haven't actually tried out the per-vertex transparency and tinting in Jay's software rasteriser, so I tried it out. Now please forget you ever saw this. I feel like a jerk for posting this screenshot (but I had too much fun playing around with it), because you will NOT see this feature any time soon. It's a side project Jay was working on years ago. Please return as you were, asking for small, simple HotOHR bugfixes and features.

artsy

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

Return as I were? I think almost all of my feature requests to date have been those which are large-scale and laborious, haha.

But I'll leave you alone about the transparency thing. It's just nice to know that something is in the works no matter the speed at which its progressing. I'm sure there's a lot of other more necessary features being focused on.

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@TMC: Oh, and I just noticed the sprite rotation in the image you uploaded, looks nice. So far I have found a workaround for that in my game. I'm just rotating my sprites in photoshop using Nearest-Neighbour then importing them in to my game as animation frames. Tedious but I don't use it too frequently so it's not a lot of added stress.

A Workaround for Transparency???
I just had this idea which may or may not work to create a "pseudo-transparency effect." I did not test this out, but may test it in the future. Feel free to try it out.

The idea is to create a transparency by rapidly flickering a certain coloured sprite, animated tile, or slice over top of the area you want transparent.

For example:
-I think the easiest way to accomplish this would be by using "Tile Animation."
-Lets say you want to make a square piece of glass which your hero can walk behind.
-Simply draw one tile which is a white square, and another tile which is blank.
-Set the animation up so that it displays one tile, waits 1 tick, displays the other tile, waits 1 tick.
-Now we have our glass!
-Place this glass animation in your map in a higher layer than your heroes and NPCs.
-Now it should hypothetically look like your character is semi-visible when passing under this animated tile.

Limitation:
-This transparency will be limited to 50%. In other words it will likely make the characters pixels become lightened by 50%.

Potential Workaround for this Limitation:
-This 50% transparency can be increased or decreased by either altering the timing of the animation, or by altering the indexing of the animation tiles.
-I would suggest not changing the timing as it would cause the effect to look choppy and less window-like.
-Instead I suggest changing the index. If you don't know what indexing is, here's a pretty self-explanatory example I found online:
http://www.glprogramming.com/red/images/Image89.gif
(Or just see my profile picture. It's a good example of many indexing styles combined together.)

So basically you would just have to have more animation tiles of which would have different indexed tiles. This is a bit complex to explain and even I would have to do it by trial and error to get it running right myself.

Additional Cool Stuff
-This same effect could be done with a colour to add "tint."
-It could be done with alternating colors and indexing to add "shimmer."
-You could of course shape your windows, or areas of transparency in a variety of shapes so that it looks a lot nicer.
-Use a dark colour in order to create a shading effect rather than a light effect.

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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 want to add tools to the sprite editor to rotate, skew and scale. I've already spent quite some time looking into algorithms specific to pixel art, but unfortunately very few exist and they aren't much better than the simple transformations. (EDIT: see here) The simple transformations don't preserve one pixel wide lines.

(Replied to the transparency stuff in the other thread).