I agree, minimaps do look pretty bad. It's something I was actually close to changing recently as I did some work on image scaling and manipulation.
Yes, each pixel of the minimap is taken from one pixel of the map. It does handle layer occlusion correctly though (aside from erroneously drawing hidden layers and ignoring parallax effects).
Just using the same random pixel every time for a tile wouldn't look grainy, but could also look quite wrong; maybe better overall.
If you just scaled down the tilesets and then rendered each of the map layers with them, you get a (somewhat) wrong result due to occlusion (parts of a tile being hidden by other map layers), and you would need to work with 32 bit images and support fractional alpha transparency to blend together the layers... we do already have that though, so it's feasible. I think we need faster conversion back to 8-bit colour; something else I nearly started on recently.
Using the most common colour in a tile is a good suggestion. It can be done efficiently without counting every colour. But that doesn't solve any problems with map layers.
Newbie Newtype wrote: Store the strings as text slices. I agree though.
Well, the number of strings could be increased. I increased them from 32 to 100 due to previous complaints. But where's the end? Is 256 is enough? Once we get the new script interpreter, the existing string system will be obsolete, but that's still a way off.
Virtuous Sword wrote: I would like to see more (small!) animations in CUSTOM (not in such a way as to detract from the screen of course, just to give a visual indication that something is happening, working, etc.,) such as loading icons
I actually started on such an animation for fun recently. Got distracted.
A lot of your other requests, like larger attack animations are part of the plan already.
Keys to switch to a neighbouring tile would be nice. (But it would erase the undo history; not nice.)
The sprite editor needs the ability to zoom and pan so that it can edit arbitrarily-sized graphics. I see a lot of requests that are suggested workarounds for the actual thing missing from the editor.
Pepsi Ranger wrote: Text import needs to (or should) implement word wrapping on import, now that textboxes can internally accept it when writing in the editor. This will make creating templates for textboxes in various word processors easier.
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I'm not actually sure how that should work. The obvious way to do it would mean that if you were sticking to 40 characters a line, if you accidentally placed 41 on a line then just that line would be wrapped, without warning. Maybe there would have to be a way to indicate which textboxes you want to be wrapped, and which you don't.
Auto re-wrapping is another possibility, but it would destroy any indentation or paragraph starts (if you sadly put multiple paragraphs/speakers in the same textbox)
Ichiro wrote: Just a simple one: Can you add bitsets to enemies to make them immune to attacks that affect the status registers?
Seems like a special case of "immune to attacks targeting stat X". But, should it really be immunity (takes 0 damage) rather than failure?