Thread of useful utilities

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Mogri
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Thread of useful utilities

Post by Mogri »

You've heard of bfxr, right?

Tilemancer is like that, but for tiles. I haven't tried it, but it looks totally awesome.

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Last edited by Mogri on Fri Apr 08, 2016 1:51 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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Post by guo »

I saw this the other day and downloaded it, but have yet to try it. I wonder if you can specify a palette; if so, this will be a very useful tool.
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Post by KF Harlock »

http://www.pixelfor.me/crc/81351833 -- this is a cool tool for creating well-balanced color ramps. I used it to create an entire palette. Mess with the sliders on there and you can have it do either single-hue ramps or hue-shifted ones that conform to a nice progression of brightness/saturation. Cool stuff!
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Post by Foxley »

Aseprite is my current drug of choice for battle sprites.

http://www.aseprite.org/

It has great indexed palette support, even using stuff like the blur tool keeps the blurred pixels within the palette, for instance. Good sprite rotation and freehand drawing algorithms. Lots to recommend about it. It's also multiplatform.
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Post by guo »

I picked pyxeledit over Aseprite. Pyxel edit is good, but I think I should have gone to Aseprite because the support is better and it has more features.
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Post by TMC »

Awesome! Tilemancer looks like it's designed on the same principle as the texture generators used in 64kB and smaller demos. I also see it is scriptable in lua; this appears to be exactly what I was hoping for. I expect to have some fun. Except for one thing: it's closed source. I was even thinking of integrating such a tool into a game to generate unique textures everywhere.

Also, I was going to mention aseprite myself, because of its reimplementations of RotSprite and smooth freehand line drawing. (The original implements of both of those are closed source. Do you know where I'm going with this?) Although aseprite is for sale by its author, it's open source software. You just have to compile it yourself. Unfortunately the current linux version has a bug that makes it unusable at the moment, and it seems pretty much impossible to compile for windows with mingw32 (you need mingw64), so I haven't had a chance to actually try it properly.
Last edited by TMC on Fri Apr 08, 2016 10:53 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by kylekrack »

Brackets is an open source text editor centered around programming, primarily web design, that has a lot of nice features without any cost.

http://brackets.io/

There are simple things like line numbers, a sidebar with document history, and a few formatting things that are nice to have. Also, it has built-in libraries for a lot of programming languages and will colorize words based on type, give suggestions, etc. It can connect with your web browser and run a live preview if you're working on web design.

There are probably a whole load of other things that it can do that I'm not smart enough to need to know about, but it's nifty. I use it for all my .hss files.
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Post by Mogri »

This isn't a utility, but if you want 16GB of sound effects, this has you covered. I don't know how long it'll be available -- it looks like they had a smaller bundle for 2015 that was taken down already.
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Post by TMC »

Cool!

I found last year's 10GB collection available for download here; from there you can download each file individually. I didn't see anything that's in both bundles, so you get 26GB of sound effects in total! Notice that these are large .wav files; there are only 637 files in the new bundle. Maybe someone somewhere has encoded them into a more reasonable format?
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Post by kylekrack »

If you want a tool that helps to make complementary, triadic, monochromatic, etc. color palettes, Adobe has an in-browser tool for that. It's really great for getting a quick color scheme that looks nice.
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Post by Mogri »

For all your rotoscoping needs, it's Paint of Persia!

I'm not sure I could see myself ever using this, but I do love the art style.
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Post by Taco Bot »

Ooh! That looks really cool! I've always wanted to make a rotoscoped game, maybe now I finally will...
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Post by kylekrack »

I could see that being extremely useful for some certain art styles in games. Especially with the ease of animation it provides.
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Post by TMC »

Nice tool for pixel art. Of course rotoscoping is still very labour intensive, but less than actually drawing animations from scratch. Of course, there are automatic rotoscoping tools, but probably no 'consumer-ready' tools for pixel art (sounds like a fun project). On the other hand there's probably dozens of research projects into it, as tracking and image segmentation are both hugely popular tasks in computer vision. I've never done anything with tracking, but you could probably combining off-the-shelf tracking and image segmentation tools to get half-decent results.
Last edited by TMC on Fri Jul 29, 2016 1:41 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Rogissidor »

My workflow:
  • Writing - OneNote; LibreOffice Calc for equipment and monster tables
    Graphics/Maps - TileStudio; Gimp for effects, color tools, and bitmap export
    Audio - Reaper; LMMS; Audacity for ogg rendering and cutting
A few of these tools are dated and I should be using newer ones. TileStudio is due for an overhaul but I haven't really gotten into the workflow of the newer pixel editing suites; Graphics Gale might fit my work style but that's almost as dated.

I'm actually really interested to know what everyone else uses for their design document and notes. I've been keeping a OneNote notebook for my game but it's messy and I'm sure there's a better solution. I used to use Celtx for dialog writing but that's changed a bit, I got an invite to try the new game writing product but haven't had time. I know I could use a long Word document but I really need a paged notebook for quick access.
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