Wonderful software (both CharPad and SpritePad), thanks for both :)
I have a question and a suggestion:
- Is there a way to move a character or group of characters within the character set, but not by swapping with a character at a different location (like the current CTRL-click functionality)? More like cutting & pasting but preserving the tile / map references?
- It would be very useful if you could shift pixels within a selected group of characters, so for example shifting left - the leftmost column of pixels of one character would shift to the rightmost column of the previous character, and so on. Obviously this would be easier to implement for left/right shifting, but maybe it could take into account the current size of the window, and use that to also shift up and down (at least when the selection is rectangular)... Anyway, I would still be happy with just the left-right option
Thank you for your appreciation.
In answer to your question, no, there is currently no way to move a block of characters to a new location (without disturbing the map data) other than swapping them one by one.
The reason being that any cut operation (or resizing to fewer items) in the charset will always update the map to account for the change (the now unavailability of those chars).
There may be exceptions in simple cases involving copying map data, then cutting/pasting char ranges in the set (to swap them) and then repasting the copied map data, but you will probably find that one of the two ranges that need to be cut from the set (in order to swap them) will end up with their references being lost from the map.
As for your suggestion about "inter-char scrolling", I do know what you mean, we already have the power to do this, it is used in the tile editor when scrolling tiles around, with the caveat that the project must be in a state of decompression (one unique char per tile cell) before it can be done, ie. to remove the possibility that other tiles will be affected.
It is a function that also exists in CharPad Glaze as an essential ingredient in making parallax scrolling backgrounds.
But it does not exist as a general option no, I personally have yet to come across a general use-case where such a function would be needed.
(you have obviously found one!)
Cheers.
I see, well I guess I'll make do with the sorting options, combined with CTRL-clicking my way through the set ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Oh I totally missed CharPad Glaze! Is there some comprehensive demo or documentation available for it? I could only find your twitter post from three years ago. My use case isn't parallax per se, but somewhat similar (and I would think it was a fairly common one): preparing soft sprite scrolling animations. It looks like Glaze might be a good fit for that job though(?)
Thanks again for the quick reply!