Thanks for your suggestions.
Yes such modes (per tile cell + per map cell) have been suggested many times before, usually because people want to be able to use the same character in different colours without needing to duplicate the character in the precious char-set (256 items max on the real machine).
While this may seem simple to do, it is absolutely not, there are several good reasons why we chose not to .
1. Memory usage - whatever size (in bytes) the tile-set or the map may be, using such a mode would instantly double the storage needed.
For multi-colour bitmap mode this could be triple (x3) as two colour/attrib bytes would be needed for each cell. It's very wasteful and unpractical for most games.
2. Char/tile editing - when editing a char or tile we can easily find the correct colour(s) for the item as they each store their own native colour value(s).
ie. In a 'per tile cell' or 'per map cell' mode there would need to be some kind of "default colour(s)" used instead. Possible but complicated/confusing.
3. Such modes would add a lot of complexity to an already very complex system and the chance of something (or probably many things) breaking is very high, potentially requiring years of further testing/debugging for very little reward.
The last releases of CharPad/SpritePad added support for 1x1 tiles, if you want to use the same char/sprite with different colours we would suggest using this feature as a work-around.
ie. a tile-set is not limited to only 256 items like the char-set (on a real machine).
I hope that helps.
Cheers.
Hi, thanks for your response.
I understand what the memory cost would be, and I've decided it would be worth paying that cost for my project. I am sorry to hear that the architecture of your project is a limiting factor here. I know all too well what it can be like working in a legacy code base; you have my sympathies.
Unfortunately, using a 1x1 tile would make my map editing workflow 4x more tedious, so that will not work for me.
No problem.
Yes it's just a very tricky thing to work into an "all-in-one" tool like this without making it incredibly complicated, we already need to handle 5 display modes in 3 possible matrix colouring methods, so that's 15 possible configurations that each need to be carefully handled in most of the operations, adding 2 more colouring methods (per tile cell, per map cell) would raise that to 25.
Some kind of dedicated tool is probably the answer, one that can take a CharPad project, strip out any "per char" colours/materials and recompress, then allow free colouring/attributing of the map cells.
Ps. you might find some use from the existing "Export Colour Map" option, it allows you to export a "per map char cell" array of colour data (colour matrix data) regardless of whether the project is tiled or not.
See...
'Import/Export >> Binary >> Export colour map (per map char cell, CmLo)'.
'Import/Export >> Text/Asm >> Export colour map (per map char cell, CmLo)'.