I understand how to generate a font and populate a screen with the font data, and using tiles to build level files.
My ambition here is to draw an object that sits on a static char screen.
I would like to define a size, draw and then populate the font and screen with the relevant data.
Selecting tiles make it att turn to a tile based project, which is not what I want. I want to place a graphics segment on a text screen. Is it me not understanding the tool or am I asking for something that isn't there?
Hi,
I'm not quite sure what you are asking..
CharPad uses a pretty simple structure, you can design a single charset, a single tile-set (if desired) and a single map (of chars OR tiles if you have created a tile-set).
ie. The map will always be a tile-map if you have a tile-set.
There is no support for layers or adding additional objects into a map or combining a char map with a tile-map.
Thanks - I will try to clarify. Take this game Birdle as an example:
This is a standard screen (font and 40x25 map) but where for example the bird is a composition of chars. In games, making a charset that you combine chars from the font into tiles, and that is likely a fair way of working, but here drawing the bird in chars and placing these chars into the map is less ideal.
I guess I am saying that it would be nice with an interface where you can draw as if it was bitmap, and you could tell where the resulting font and mapdata would go in the font and map.
So marking the bird here, and being able to draw as if it was bitmap and then have the program optimise the use of chars and poke it back to font and map.
The same would be applicable for the Birdle logo.
(This bird is a mix of sprites and chars, so it's a bad example, but let's not dig into the specific details on my example here)
Yes I think I see what you mean, this kind of thing can really get extremely complicated! :D
Where there is a need to combine different char based elements, ie. a 2x2 tile -set (and it's chars) and another simple charset, the best CharPad can currently offer is the option to manually copy/paste between projects.
ie. If project 'A' contains a tile-set (+chars) of your game's large letters and project 'B' contains your 1x1 alphanumerics (chars)...
..to combine them you could copy project B's chars, then load project A and paste the copied chars to the front of the charset.
The paste will push forward the existing chars (and automatically refactor the char references in the tiles) of project A.
This would give you a single charset that contains all of the images for your 1x1 and your 2x2 elements.
I'm sure you can appreciate just how complex this kind of thing can get!
At some point I may begin work on a separate tool that just deals with the problem of CharPad project combinations, although it would be better if such things could be done dynamically by the C64, then your game could shuffle things around as needed at run-time.
The thing you are asking for is kind of a Holy Grail!
Humble thanks. If we assume the modus operandi of copying between projects, then a general editor (with arbitrary map size) where you paint freely inside that area, and then select to generate a font from that as the first step. Then you could paste that result to another project, I guess that would mean covering the full process.