This would make things nicer. Wouldn't have to resort to rotating it with another program, editing it, then reimporting it. You just rotate, clean it up, and get rid of any useless tiles in the same program.
Weren't the rotated sprites made with Rotsprite good enough in most cases? I remember they looked way better than rotating them by hand.
I'm not the most technical person here so I wouldn't know how you would go about doing it, but I think it would be great to implement a way to edit the enigma mapping in the same way you would go about editing nemesis mappings. I know there is PlaneED for that, but I could just never get that working and it'd be a big plus in this case, to be able to edit the title and sega screens all in one program.
If it's not been mentioned already, Red Crimson would appreciate support for the Streets of Rage games. I was just quickly scanning through the topic so I dunno if it's been mentioned or not.
They still required some slight tweaking, but not as much if you rotate it through any other program like Graphics Gale or Photoshop. Sample images from the original thread.
For rotation to work, the program would have to turn the sprite into a bitmap, rotate the bitmap, then generate new tiles and mappings from that bitmap. And I really don't think I can do rotation for anything other than 90° and have it not look terrible. I am not going to try to shove plane mappings into a sprite mappings editor. However, a separate plane mappings editor is a possibility. As much as I like the SoR games, I'm not trying to make a general MD sprite mappings editor here. Also I don't know anything about the formats they use, and if anything is compressed somebody will have to make a .NET library for me to use (like KENSSharp).
Yeah Sonik Sprite has never worked correctly for me. I tried to save my work only for it to save as a gray box for half the image. Probably because I can't figure out how to install that one MSCOMCTL.OCX file that is required for it to work. When I try to open it, it says there is no program to associate it with.
Goddamn I'd love for you to hop on that MainMemory. I can't stand SonMapEd. Not a knock on the original author of it but it just isn't all that intuitive for someone just looking to dick around with stuff.
You don't run OCX files; you have to put them somewhere where programs can get to them. Install http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=10019; failing that, install the Visual Basic 6 runtime.
So, the main reason why I haven't shown any progress on this or even announced that I'm definitely making this is that I have no idea how it should look/work, GUI-wise. Like, some kind of combination of SonLVL's tile editor and SCDPCspr, with some additional thing for selecting sprite pieces? Any thoughts?
I think Sonik Sprite has the best user friendly GUI for this. I would add a simple "paint like" editor to it.
That is a good idea actually. Make it feel like Sonik Sprite, because although being a very limited program by itself, it does have a user friendly GUI. Additionally, you could do this in a sub-menu solely for drawing, while the main window looks and acts similar to SonMapEd.
I recently thought of something regarding being able to simply draw on sprites: sprite pieces can be "layered" over other pieces. I would have to somehow group the pieces into layers when a piece overlaps a previous piece, and have them edited separately. For example, Tails' walking sprites would have a layer for the main sprite, and a layer for the tails underneath it.
I'm looking forward to seeing the end result. SonEd was particularly difficult to use, then Sonlvl came along and made everything much easier. I hope this means that your project will be similar, and will replace SonMapEd and its evil twisted confusing ways. I'm pretty sure that SonMapEd was the thing that made me ragequit from my hacking, because I found it so difficult to use. Good luck with your program!
After considering the matter for a long time, I have decided that I have no idea how to actually make a sprite mappings editor. Sorry to get your hopes up.
I hope this means that it will only get put on standby... and not completely get scrapped... I know I'm keeping my hopes up for something that may very well end up not happening... BUT, this is the guy that gave us SonLVL. A program so easy and good enough to use that a hack noob like myself could mess about with it without screwing up too much. I hope you will get back to this someday...
Just out of curiosity, why do you have no idea? Is it that you are not sure as to how to go about writing it via code? Or is it more of a GUI issue that has you stumped?