Bits and Bobs

As I've got sidetracked with Paradroid instead of just writing the probably small amount of code it would be to handle this mid scanline image stuff I'm having to add some more functionality needed for the app for it's main purpose, game creation/graphics manipulation rather than bitmap/image conversions.

I've re-worked my octree code to work in a simpler method to just count colours in an image and even using the slow VB.NET getpixel function it's still surprisingly fast, which is good. The idea is for most game graphics manipulation you'll want to be in some kind of indexed mode but there shouldn't be anything to stop people loading PNG or other non-indexed formats. Then before the code kicks in doing it's thing (remapping tiles, shrinking charsets, whatever) it needs to check the file format for indexed and if it isn't, be able to create some data from it that is, so knowing if there are too many colours (256) will let it know if some colour reduction is needed. For a fixed system (A8, C64, etc) that's not a massive problem because they'll be a fixed palette anyway and just running the image through the remapper will sort it out, other stuff will need to be allowed it's own palette.

Next up is the bitpattern selection box (sounds like chocolates). This will display a palette swatch, a dropdown (or other display) for available bit patterns (eg hires = 0 or 1, multicolour 2bpp = 00,01,10,11) and then let you select which colours on the loaded image match those machine internal bit patterns displaying the bitpattern over the colour as you click and probably doing a remap of the image to show what's happening. Probably also a good idea to have a colour picker to select the base colours for each bitpattern from the image.

Lots to do still but all this stuff goes well towards getting the app ready for Exploding Fist and some other projects I want to work on.


Pete