Tools update

It'd be fun to try your editors! I'd probably do any serious development on a computer, but it's still cool to have an opportunity to try something I would've loved to have as a kid.

(Nova Storm, 7 February 2024)

I told you about Nova's work on NES and SNES already. Earlier this year, she shown interest into NDS homebrew and linkers, so I proposed her to try the dsgametools, and she replied with the heartwarming sentence above. My last tools release dates back from 2021, and while there are not that many things that have changed since, some annoying bugs were fixed nonetheless. So I went for a new package with some README, example files and PERL tools in addition to the .nds files proper. 

Salut les neveux. Si vous voulez tenter de faire des jeux sur Nintendo DS avec mes outils, vous êtes arrivés sur la bonne page. Téléchargez le .zip en utilisant l'image-lien ci-dessus et copiez les fichiers *dlta.nds à la racine de la carte-mémoire de votre DS. Tant que vous y êtes, vous pouvez aussi créer un répertoire nommé "moving" à la racine de la carte mémoire et déposer les fichiers présents dans Demo/efsroot/ du zip. On fait bien attention à ne rien effacer, on éjecte en toute sécurité, on remet tout en place dans la DS et voilà.

Level Editor: 

• fixing bugs with meta buttons;
• add support for special tiles used in conveyer belts and flowing water
• cosmetics: buttons with shadow and show when they are pushed
  

AnimEditor: 

• fixing 'apply to all previous frames' and 'apply to all future frames' buttons.
• only store thumbnails when the animation is used. 

runME:

• cosmetics: buttons with shadow and show when they are pushed 

SEDSdlta est votre éditeur de graphismes. Il permet de définir des palettes de couleurs et des pages de blocs 16x16 ou 32x32 qui seront sauvées dans des fichiers .spr. Ces fichiers peuvent ensuite être ouverts dans l'éditeur d'animations MEDSdlta ou dans l'éditeur de niveau LEDSdlta. Les niveaux créés par LEDSdlta seront sauvés dans des fichiers .map

Deux points communs dans tous ces éditeurs: maintenir L enfoncé pendant qu'on touche un bouton/une grille/une image à l'écran permet de faire une opération différente. Et appuyer sur L+R donne un peu d'aide.

These tools seem like they're very compact and full of features, maybe to the point of feeling a little bit cramped or unintuitive, though it's tricky to do something about that with this sort of screen resolution. I do appreciate the manual that you can access whenever to find out how to do stuff, and I'd rather have all the features than have a simplified tool. I liked the "scan" button in the sprite editor; that's not something I've really seen in pixel art programs.

I can certainly agree with that. It isn't rare that I have to dig my own blog -- or worse, the source code -- of AnimEDS when I want to do something a bit less frequent like copy a frame to a given position, create a new skeletton or adjust hit boxes. I'll have to complete the "L+R to get hint on how to use things" but it's good news that someone noticed it and appreciated it. Maybe it could be completed by a "please explain that control" mode where you can touch something on screen and learn about it rather than use it ...

I feel like it would help a lot to have buttons that bring up menus (especially on the animation editor, which needs more explanation than sprite editors do), where you'd have more room to make it clear what each option does or avoid needing button combos so you can fit more options on-screen, but that has to be weighed against how much it would slow down a user who knows what they're doing. You *could* have quick shortcuts with small icons alongside a button that brings up a menu that's less compact, though.

I have started something along these lines for 'monsters edition' in LEDS... That will be motivating to push it further

As you may have guessed, that lovely avatar for Nova comes straight from her website ;)