I mentioned this program in reply to a thread below but it seems to
have gone un-noticed so I think I will give it its own thread here

IT IS THE BEST C64 CHARACTER & BACKGROUND EDITOR THE WORLD HAS EVER SEEN!!!

Forget Lasse's tools and get this now (sorry lasse pal ;)

Actually its a 1st release and is probably needing some beta testing and suggestions so Id really appreciate a bit of feedback.

http://www.coder.myby.co.uk

Hi,

this is a nice program but might need some keyboard shortcuts for going between screens?

Also, I see your per-character color mode associates the colors with the tiles rather than chars; this offers flexibility but doubles memory use of the tiles, and might require more complex data access on the C64 (per-char color games such as Turrican, Cool World, Nobby etc. traditionally use a 256 byte lookup table for the char colors)

Thankyou for your suggestions Lasse, I have noted them down
for the next release.

Dont hesitate to tell me of any other desirable features.

hi, i have problems opening the rar-file of spritepad 1.5. i used version 1.3 of your spritepad and like to have the update now.

could you mail me a zipped version? daniel [at] popelganda [dot] de


thanks a lot. i'll also take a look at your charpad.
_________________

Oh hmm ok, I replaced the rar with a zip file.

Come and get it
_________________

thanks, got it!
_________________

@SubChrist: Please make the high nibble bits of the 256 byte colortable (like Turrican games) selectable. The high nibble bits are often use for collision detection (solid chars, deadly chars etc...)

Your Spritepad is a cool tool! I like it and use it next time.

Good work!
Greets
_________________

nice tools!

my only suggestiong as far as charpad is concerned is that it would be nice if the map/tiles/char windows could all be displayed on screen at once, rather than having to keep swapping between them. I can appreciate they look neater the way you've done it, but IMO it would help usability a bit if you didn't have to keep swapping between them. That's only a pretty minor problem though - everything else seems good!

Spritepad is a nice tool as far as editing one sprite is concerned, though it would be great if it had good support for pixelling multiple sprite images. I realise the browser works so you can see sprites positioned next to each other, which is handy, but what I think would be really good is if you could actually pixel and view in one combined image. For example, there could be an option for a 2x2 sprite image which would give you a 24x42 grid to pixel in and display the 2x2 images at the side. You'd essentially be pixelling 4 seperate sprites, but the graphician wouldn't have to worry too much about this. It would be even better if you could incorperate the animator into this so you could test a series of animated 2x2 sprites (or other combinations - I guess the most common ones would be 1x2, 2x1, 2x2, 3x2, 2x3, maybe also 2x4 and 4x2). This is sort of thing that's often lacking from most c64 tools and that in my opinion could prove very useful! I realise obviously it's ok me suggesting these things when I don't have to code them :) If you feel you've taken the program as far as you want to, that's fine! (it does seem very good at what it does!). just thought I'd mention it anyway :)

btw. have you ever thought of doing a bitmap editor? :)

Thanks for your ideas guys


@biguser...

Ok, I'll allow editing of the upper nybbles in the next version, that
seems like a good and efficient way to handle the char properties,
colour + 16 possible levels of material hardness/passability or something
or maybe I could just let you toggle the 4 bits directly.


@Deev..

Sprite layering, yes that would be very useful, I'll definitely
consider that for a future release if I can find a friendly way to
implement it.

+Yes I have thought of doing a bitmap editor, Some months ago and
I wrote much of it too, Im just not finished with it yet, writing a paint
program is always a major work and the fact that its painting for VIC format doesnt make it any simpler or shorter a job than to code one for Windows bitmaps.

Anyway I'll let you know if I ever do finish it but after all that work it
may have to come with a price tag
_________________

I vote for individual bits. Also, for more complicated char collision properties, you might want to optionally allow a whole additional byte per char (for 8 bits of collision info)

Bitmap editor is possibly a can of worms, unless you like the idea of requests for every possible exotic graphics mode there is (I hate even thinking of it)

for many "advanced" modes, gfx2 does that job nicely, certainly as far as IFLI is concerned (which I guess is the main one). However, there's not much for just doing standard multicolour bitmaps with the restrictions that brings (if anyone can tell me different please do!)