making images with multiple palettes and exporting tilemaps

[benjaminsantiago]

I recently did a test of background mode 0, using the same image with multiple palettes:


however it was a bit of a pain going from photoshop --> rearranging tiles --> gif --> pcx --> pcx2snes. And it seems like sometimes the palettes are out of order, which is problematic when trying to designate the transparency color.

I'd like to create 2bpp images and take advantage of having 8 palettes and I'm wondering what people use for creating tilemaps. Scripts with tiled or something? custom tools?

[Drew Sebastino]

And it seems like sometimes the palettes are out of order, which is problematic when trying to designate the transparency color.

Does Photoshop have anything like this?

[psycopathicteen]

Am I the only one who thought that was a picture of Hitler at first glance?

[benjaminsantiago]

Does Photoshop have anything like this?

Nah, you can view the color table if your image is in an indexed color mode, but you can't rearrange them. When you save for web with a .gif or png 8 you can order the colors by hue/luminance/popularity which is pretty helpful but seems to not output consistently when converting with pcx2snes. I got the windowed version of pcx2snes to work again, so I'm fine for now I guess.

That's gimp right? Can you use a tablet with it? I use a wacom to do my drawing. I wouldn't mind converting images with gimp if it is free.

Ideally I'd like to be able to have a custom color chooser limited to the SNES's 32768 colors and some way to create palette's that can be applied/switched between multiple blocks of pixels

[benjaminsantiago]

Am I the only one who thought that was a picture of Hitler at first glance?

haaaa yeah I thought it looked a bit like a shaven hitler

[Drew Sebastino]

That's gimp right?

Yes.

Can you use a tablet with it? I use a wacom to do my drawing.

It appears so, but I use it on my computer.

I wouldn't mind converting images with gimp if it is free.

It's free.

Ideally I'd like to be able to have a custom color chooser limited to the SNES's 32768 colors

I really wish I could do that too... What I have been doing is just counting by 8 to get a color, like 0,8,16,32,24, and so on. It would still be nice if you could limit the color depth to where it was 0-31 instead of 0-255, but I haven't found a program capable of doing that.

[93143]

What I have been doing is just counting by 8 to get a color, like 0,8,16,32,24, and so on.

That won't quite do it; you'll end up at 248 instead of 255, and it will (or should; see below) round to 30 instead of 31.

There are two nearly-identical ways to do this correctly; the division method and the shift method. The results are as follows:

Division method (rounded to nearest):

Code: Select all

0 8 16 25 33 41 49 58 66 74 82 90 99 107 115 123 132 140 148 156 165 173 181 189 197 206 214 222 230 239 247 255

Shift method:

Code: Select all

0 8 16 24 33 41 49 57 66 74 82 90 99 107 115 123 132 140 148 156 165 173 181 189 198 206 214 222 231 239 247 255

These should give identical results when converted to SNES format, but I can't guarantee anything since pcx2snes (at least the version I have) does some kind of weird chroma dithering - which is why I don't use pcx2snes except for rough mockups...

...

If you're using the GIMP, just try the built-in posterize function with 32 levels. Unless they've changed it recently, it should snap the colour values to the numbers from the division method. (Alternately, you could save it as a 16-bit X1R5G5B5 bitmap and reload it... yes, I know neither of these helps with colour picking...)

[benjaminsantiago]

93143 thanks for the info and links to the post. I've been bad at lurking on here lately.

Espozo, sorry I didn't word things very well. I'm aware gimp is free and by tablet I meant a drawing tablet like this guy:



I'll look into it, but it also looks like making a photoshop extension is relatively easy and I have some experience with actionscript.

[Drew Sebastino]

Espozo, sorry I didn't word things very well. I'm aware gimp is free and by tablet I meant a drawing tablet like this guy:

Apparently, it does work with a drawing tablet. I looked up gimp tablet and it said something about how it works with a Wacom tablet.

[Khaz]

Just to toss my two cents in, I'm still using those Excel macros I wrote for all my graphical needs. It's slow and clunky in many ways but so was every other alternative I ever tried.

In case you hadn't already seen it. *shrugs*

EDIT: Didn't notice you were asking about tilemaps more specifically. I do that in a spreadsheet too but it's marginally worth it, it's just mildly easier to edit and navigate than a notepad file.

[benjaminsantiago]

Just to toss my two cents in, I'm still using those Excel macros I wrote for all my graphical needs. It's slow and clunky in many ways but so was every other alternative I ever tried.

I'll take a look at the excel stuff, but truthfully I hate excel and most of the ms office suite. It is unfair and mostly unwarranted, I think mostly to do with the old microsoft office ui that I found really hard to navigate, the 2013 interface change I found pretty nice.

I was working in photoshop as my job for a while so I'm pretty quick with it, that's my motivation for making extensions for photoshop. However I'm still not sure about the tilemap editing, I'm going to take a deeper look at Tiled and how it can be extended. I imagine it isn't too hard to spit out a text file formatted correctly

[benjaminsantiago]

Apparently, it does work with a drawing tablet. I looked up gimp tablet and it said something about how it works with a Wacom tablet.

thanks dude I didn't mean to ask a google-able question.

[rainwarrior]

I use a tablet with Gimp sometimes. In a lot of cases, the interface is pretty much the same as a mouse, so it's not like the application requires direct support for it anyway.

However, when it comes to pressure sensitivity, Gimp has a longstanding Windows-only bug: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=687193

If you don't need pressure sensitivity (often not relevant to pixel art), this is fine, but there appears to be a lot of tablets that are poorly supported in this way. Just, FYI.

[Khaz]

I'll take a look at the excel stuff, but truthfully I hate excel and most of the ms office suite. It is unfair and mostly unwarranted, I think mostly to do with the old microsoft office ui that I found really hard to navigate, the 2013 interface change I found pretty nice.

Totally understandable, I couldn't stand Excel either until I was forced to learn it for my job too. My spreadsheets aren't the best tools but they get the job done. If for whatever reason you do try to use it and have any trouble, let me know.