Sprite
Editor
MiKRO's new
Atari 8-bit graphics utility
Hi all, some
weeks (or months?) ago I released my small
tool called Sprite Editor. This was patched
after some days and here we have version
1.1. So, why did I do it? A long time ago
I started coding my game for Atari XE/XL
machines and I needed to edit and (mainly)
animate sprites. The only tool I knew was
by Lufa of Satantronic. This tool is very
simple and has some bugs.
My program,
Sprite Editor (SE) consists of two parts
- editor and animator. I'll try to explain
the main functions and features.
Editor
Nice graphics
interface :-) I didn't use standard Graphics
0 mode because of problems with the cursor
(you know - priority backround vs players
vs playfields...), so I redefined the font
for Graphics 12 which you can see on the
picture.
There are
only 4 bits/character used, but I think
it looks nice - a lot of editing functions.
You can mirror the sprite horizontally or
vertically, edit a sprite that is bigger
than the screen, invert it, move it, edit
6-color 8-bit sprites or 3-color 16-bit
sprites (creating third color by overlapping
sprite 1/2 or 3/4). 26 positions for every
player are available at all times. It's
enough for everyone I hope! Each sprite
and each position can have its own, independent
color! How is it possible? Download my tool
and read the documentation!
Animator
This part makes
full use of the Antic hardware. You can
switch collisions of sprites ON/OFF, 1x,
2x or 4x zoom and, the feature I'm most
proud of, size correction ON/OFF. What does
that last one mean? Probably you know how
Antic works - you want (for example) 4x
sprite size, one pixel
really has a
width of 4 pixels, but the height is only
one scanline! And we need what? Square pixels!
So, here you are them.
Parameters
can be changed in real-time. This is a hidden(?)
feature of my animator - you can change
speed, collisions, correction and definitions
of animation in real-time without stopping
the animation! I was very surprised when
I discovered that.
At the moment
sprite data must be ripped direct from memory,
no save or load function. Some things like
free-directional moving with each sprite
(in the animator) are still missing, too.
Maybe in version 2.0.
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Issue
14