Sonic and Sega Retro Message Board: sega16 - Viewing Profile - Sonic and Sega Retro Message Board

@flamewing Thank you for the suggestions. I was not aware of the Pixelated Image Abstraction algorithm. This will be useful for tile palette row selection. Also the image segmentation algorithms look useful especially k-means. I hope to try and add some of these.

@GeneHF Thank you for telling me that. Sometimes I have trouble knowing how others will react to something that I have written. Is it the Are you tired of... introduction that seems this way? The reason I wrote the introduction that way is because I wanted to answer the question that I thought people would have when they read this topic: what is this and why should I use it? After that question is answered the next question might be: what advantages does this provide over what I am using now? I presume how I handled answering the third question is what is bothering you? My goal is not to cause offense. I will edit my post and try a Wikipedia style post please tell me if you think it is more effective.

@Ritz Neo Geo would be very interesting and in fact I will do it. It does rely more heavily on sprites so what I will do is have a mode where the sprites are treated as tiles to make layout easier. As for more than 256 color support that can already be done. I am just not sure if the quanitzers I am using support that.

I have been doing some more work on Retro Graphics Toolkit recently. I have decided to add support for Lua scripting allowing more much greater flexibility in what Retro Graphics Toolkit can do.

This image may look a bit boring as it is just a simple mandelbrot however the interesting aspect of this was that it was generated by simply running a Lua script and then reducing the truecolor image to a palette (what you see here). Even better the program to do it was only 73 lines including mandelbrot code and I could make it even shorter see https://github.com/C...otToTilemap.lua
I think this will make Retro Graphics Toolkit more flexible for example one big advantage being making custom file formats very easy to use.

flamewing, on 14 July 2014 - 12:00 PM, said:

I understand that your post is a bit old but you know I too am working on a utility with sonic oriented features called Retro Graphics Toolkit. In fact you can see that I recently posted about it in this topic showing it's new import sprite sheet capabilities. I would be interested in seeing how Retro Graphics Toolkit reacts to your optimized DPLCs and maybe even adding such optimizing features in Retro Graphics Toolkit. I tested Retro Graphics Toolkit utilizing sonic 2's sonic mapping and DPLC and was able to produce bit per bit identical output. I do not believe that anyone would object to my program producing more optimal files even if it means the output no longer remains identical.

I am working on adding import sprite sheet functionality to my project Retro Graphics Toolkit. The way this works is to first determine weather the sprite sheet uses alpha transparency or a mask color is used and what mask color to use. If alpha transparency is detected you still have the option to use a mask color. To find the mask three or one histogram(s) depending on bytes per pixel is constructed and for each pixel entry 0-255 is incremented and the highest value is the mask color. This algorithm is fast and uses little ram.

After that rectangles are constructed around what is not the mask color. These rectangles are then merged to form a sprite. The algorithm works very well in identifying sprites only occasionally missing some dust that is not attached.

Once complete you can right click on the sprite to remove it, left click on a removed sprite to re-add it and drag the rectangles to resize what is selected. After that overlapping rectangles will be merged in order to fix non connected dust or sprites that are not connected but should be one sprite group anyways.
On the plus side I won't just leave it at this stage and just add the text (incomplete) to the menu entry, I will finish it. However already all sprites do import well using minimal sprites. I believe SonMapEd just creates 1x1 tile sprites.