Vic 20 Screen and Character designer

You need an actual VIC.

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beamrider
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Re: Vic 20 Screen and Character designer

Post by beamrider »

0.51 uploaded to fix a bug when "SmartPaste"-ing overlaping ranges.
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beamrider
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Re: Vic 20 Screen and Character designer

Post by beamrider »

I've uploaded a new version 0.52

This incorporates a suggestion by Robert Hurst and the main screen editor on the left is now resizable (by the grip in the bottom right hand corner) allowing a large screen without cutting the character view in half.

Image
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beamrider
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Re: Vic 20 Screen and Character designer

Post by beamrider »

I've added a new version 0.55 with some bug fixes and a new feature...

The ability to download data from a URL in the import tab as well as accepting and downloading data supplied as a URL parameter:

e.g. the following link should load up Pooyan screen designs

http://87.81.155.196/vic20sdd/Vic20SDD. ... %3Fraw%3D1

The link appears after the "?dl=" and it must be URI encoded if it contains any "non URL" characters e.g. question marks etc - This can be done at the following site:

http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/dencoder/

Note: This facility won't work if you download the zip file and run locally
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beamrider
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Re: Vic 20 Screen and Character designer

Post by beamrider »

version 0.56 uploaded : supports correct horizontal flip of multi-color characters
johncl
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Re: Vic 20 Screen and Character designer

Post by johncl »

Thanks for developing on this still! A lot of very nice features! I think the only thing missing from this tool now is a button to lay out the chars from the charset on the screen spread out (char 0 in top left, then 1 to the right, etc) so that one can more easily do bitmaps. A draw directly on screen area where clicks are mapped into drawing on the char on that particular position would also be cool. That way you basically have a full drawing tool now that you can scale the drawing area up to cover the full screen.

Another feature that would possibly be nice is a way to draw on the "char colour layer" so one can quickly colour chars. Atm if you decide to change char colour you have to go into each char and then change char colour on that and draw the char on the screen one at a time.

EDIT: I see the new minipaint feature practically does spread them out in a 20x12 layout (although I did not know the indexing went downwards one column at a time). So that generally does the trick for that particular bitmap setup.
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beamrider
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Re: Vic 20 Screen and Character designer

Post by beamrider »

Thanks, glad you're finding it useful.

I kind of wanted to draw a line at the moment based on its current feature set. Maybe in the future I will add support for sprites/tiles. Not sure I want to go as far as painting on the screen at bit level, but we'll see. I could easily do the layout characters though I suppose.

You can already draw on the character colour layer easily..

1. Turn off all the masks except colour.
2. Go to draw mode
3. Set the "View as" to character colour
4. Pick any character and set the "intended colour" as required
5. Draw on the screen to colour the areas required.
6. You can also switch back to select mode highlight a rectangular area and fill a colour in a similar manner, you just need to make sure that the last thing you do before pressing 'Fill' is making sure the intended colour is set correctly.

p.s. you can do the same thing for multicolour mode..
johncl
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Re: Vic 20 Screen and Character designer

Post by johncl »

Ah thanks. That would solve the colour drawing challenge. As for the pixel thing, most artists will hand pixel anyway at each char level, and likely not have much problem with that. The full screen drawing thing is basically just nice to flesh out a quick sketch as a basis before the hand-pixelling starts at char level.
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Re: Vic 20 Screen and Character designer

Post by rhurst »

beamrider wrote:... and the main screen editor on the left is now resizable
Now that is choice. Well done, man! :o
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darkatx
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Re: Vic 20 Screen and Character designer

Post by darkatx »

johncl pretty much nailed it.

Either way, if sprites or tile support was implemented or bit level sketching was allowed on screen that would be huge.

:)
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beamrider
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Re: Vic 20 Screen and Character designer

Post by beamrider »

darkatx wrote:johncl pretty much nailed it.

Either way, if sprites or tile support was implemented or bit level sketching was allowed on screen that would be huge.

:)
I've had a think about this and decided to take it forward.

The way it will work is that an area of the screen view (which can be as large as the whole screen if required) can be selected and then opened up in a separate bitmap editor window. The characters for the area can be laid out before hand as required, starting with the current character in the character view and incrementing in either row or column major order. I don't plan on preventing ad-hoc layouts and even repeated characters but obviously it won't behave as a bitmap then.

I've got the basics working and I can edit individual pixels, but it needs a fair bit of tidy up and all of the new buttons need implementing.


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johncl
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Re: Vic 20 Screen and Character designer

Post by johncl »

Wow, thats really great! :) Excellent work!
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beamrider
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Re: Vic 20 Screen and Character designer

Post by beamrider »

I've uploaded version 0.60 which features a bitmap editor as requested.

The editor is opened by selecting cells on the main screen and clicking the "Edit as Bitmap" button.

The bitmap can be edited pixel by pixel and changes are reflected back to the main screen and character views. It is suggested to use a spare screen for working with sprites/tiles as bitmaps. Changes made in the character editor or screen view are not currently automatically propagated back to the Bitmap editor but you can force a repaint by turning on/off one of the grids.

There are two modes: select and pixel. Pixel mode allows pixels to be draw in one of the colour registers. The color register used for "pixelling" is currently taken from the "Intended Character Attributes" of the character view. Also you can not change the foreground colour of a character cell in the bitmap editor as this is considered a property of the screen, not of the character. You can change the colour of cells in the main window and then refresh the bitmap editor to pick these up as mentioned above. Multicolor mode is supported for display but no special consideration is given to it in the provided functions (e.g. flip, rotation).

Select mode manages the active selection with a gold rectangle. The operations of the new buttons should be fairly self explanatory and all work on the active selection.

The Layout Rows and Layout Cols (on the main screen view) are intended to create a Row major or Column major distribution of unique characters with the first character starting at the currently viewed character in the character editor window. This creates a "pseudo-bitmap" from characters for the Vic-20.

There is no undo/redo implemented on the bitmap editor. You can revert all changes made since the editor was opened by clicking "Select All" followed by "Revert".

As in the screen view, holding down 'ctrl' will constrain drawing to horizontal and vertial lines. In select mode, it will constrain to square selection areas (needed for rotation operations).

** Finally a disclaimer, if what you're editing is not actually a bitmap (i.e. >1 occurences of the same character value) unpredictable behaviour will occur in the editor window**

Enjoy!
Last edited by beamrider on Wed Jan 21, 2015 7:56 am, edited 3 times in total.
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majikeyric
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Re: Vic 20 Screen and Character designer

Post by majikeyric »

You made a fantastic job :)
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Jeff-20
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Re: Vic 20 Screen and Character designer

Post by Jeff-20 »

I took a peek, but I've having problems with the new features in Chrome. Can anyone confirm? I may just be using it wrong.
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johncl
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Re: Vic 20 Screen and Character designer

Post by johncl »

Works for me in Chrome at least. You first have to select the chars in the screen area you want to edit as bitmap, then press the button. The bitmap editor will ofc edit those chars that are in those locations so if you just clear the screen you are editing the same char in all positions. So you can either place out some chars in those positions as you need them and then mark them and edit bitmap. Or if you want to do a full bitmap screen just press the "New Minipaint drawing" button first to set it all up so you can actually do full bitmap drawing of any part of the full image. Its a really really nice feature, and quite more advanced than any editor I have used.
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