Monday, June 11, 2007

Smoove DS ... Another Sprite Editor in Development

A new blog has just pop'd up in the Drunken Coder community. A blog of special interest for me as Smoove is doing his own pixel editor too ... I hope he won't mind my intensive comment on his posts, and i sincerely hope each other's shared experience will benefit to both our projects ^_^
Un nouveau blog vient de faire son apparition dans la communauté Drunker Coder. Un blog particulièrement intéressant pour moi, puisque Smoove s'attaque lui aussi à un Sprite Editor. Comme on dit, "y'a plus dans 2 têtes que dans une". J'espère qu'on pourra s'aider l'un-l'autre.

Par exemple, il nous a mis une image de "palette façon oldschool". Si vous avez jamais utilisé un éditeur de pixel (p.ex. le grandissime Deluxe Paint), vous savez à quel point travailler avec une palette mal organisée peut devenir un calvaire. L'ennui, c'est que c'est extrèmement fréquent dès que l'image est passé par n'importe quel convertisseur.

Just an example, he posted an example of "oldschool color sorting". If you've ever been involved in pixel edition, you know that dull task of creating a "workable" palette out of the mess some .gif or any other kind of "automatic conversion from RGB to indexed colors" could create.
If not, just look on the side here. Blues are scattered with other colors, etc. A regular "sort" function will have hard time identifying rasters in the 3-D color space.
L'ennui, c'est que pour un PC, ça va être particulièrement délicat de retrouver les dégradés dans l'espace 3D "RVB". Et si nos yeux font très facilement la différence entre de l'orange et du bleu, par contre pour ce qui est de "trier" des nuances de bleu, c'est souvent plus délicat.

Alors pourquoi ne pas laisser chacun faire ce qu'il fait le mieux? donnons à l'utilisateur la possibilité d'indiquer au programme quelles sont les couleurs à ajouter dans un raster donné, et la DS se chargera de les trier au fur et à mesure. Et éventuellement, on pourrait indiquer les couleurs les plus proches de la couleur choisie.

Your eyes are good at discriminating blues from oranges, but not at sorting blues... so i thought we could have something like a "color to raster" picking tool that would allow the user to collect colors he want to have included in a specific raster, and then let the DS do the sorting. You could then remove/split if some colors seems not to belong to the produced raster. We could also have the DS give hints to the user at which colors it "think" to be "close" to the one you picked.

edit: the smooveDS project is now defunct. It never went much further than basic attempts, partly due to the difficulty to save files on a FAT filesystem in these early days. 'MW', his author has now moved to iPhone programming where Smoove is now known as "hiscore pixeleditor"

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi.

Thanks for linking me. At least I posted a very first version, but the thing of color sorting is interesting. No prblem with the comment, I like it. btw: I could not find the link to yout editor...

PypeBros said...

hmm . You're quite right. I'm caught at not providing demo once again.

I don't seem to have a recent built here, but you can already check out the CVS in the sourceforge project: http://dsgametools.cvs.sourceforge.net/dsgametools/

I'll upload the latest build tonight once i'm back @home ^_^

Anonymous said...

Well written article.