I have a question, I've been using the free version for a while now and finally purchased the paid version hoping I would be able to change the colors of each of the 40x25 custom characters I created on the map editor screen (my game screen) to any of the available 16 colors on the palet and then export a binary color map, is this possible? I cannot seem to figure it out, please help...
Export >> Binary >> Export Colour Map
Export >> Text >> Export Colour Map
Direct editing of the map cell colours is not possible because the program does not support "per map cell" colouring, only per map, per tile or per char, the above (export) options are included as a work-around.
It is just a great deal more optimal (when limited to 64KB) to associate colours with maps, tiles or chars, hence the option you require does not exist.
Sorry.
Your support is greatly appreciated, feel free to convince me to add such an option but weaving it in to the existing code would be months of work, would further complicate an already complex system and I have yet to see it used in any commercial game.
As far as commercial games go for the C64, I doubt you will see any, however I have been busy creating games and so have many other people, who knows where that will go one day... you do offer a free version but I paid $15 because I wanted an additional feature which was not there, no big deal, I use your program with all the software i create and glad I could support you, it would be a great feature and I don't see why it would be so difficult, it could be a completely separate "sub feature, unrelated to what you have now but uses the map in a separate map color editor (a separate window) with an export function, unaffecting other features of the rest of the program, seems easy to me... and might influence more to purchase, seems I've seen others ask for this as well... And if it were me, I would do it just for the fun of it...
There I've tried to convince you...
Yes fair enough, I completely see where you are coming from.
Adding it as a kind of novelty "add on" would be fairly simple compared to trying to add it as an actual proper colouring method.
The latter option is really not trivial as it would need to be worked into every single element of the existing model and all of the existing tools such as the image importer and snapshot ripper etc + almost every operation has to take special consideration when it comes to a project's display mode and colouring method (currently 5x3 possible configurations + tiled/untiled conditions + special care around anything to do with ECM mode).
If it were trivial I obviously would have just added it a long time ago.
So knowing this, you wouldn't care that a project could not be saved/loaded using "per map cell colouring" (a new project file format would need to be designed).
You would be happy to just be able to paint colours directly into the map and save them to a file?
What about the bitmap modes? ie. 2 or 3 colours per cell, how would that work?
What about material attributes? would you want to directly paint those as well?
Just asking, I am genuinely interested to know what you would like.
The way I've been doing it is by creating the binary myself and then copying from memory into the color ram memory on the c64, see below...
(Ive tried to psot screen shots to show you, I keep getting an error, please complete verification to continue)
It would be nice to paint the map editor and then have charpad create the binary to be imported, it would make it easier to alter color schemes for just simple custom character sets on a game screen... The above game screen and character set was made with charpad, the color scheme is imported thru the assembler as you can see... Yes you would need to save the project and then recall it later to edit it and also export it as a binary... The binary would consist of 1000 binary numbers between 0 and 15 corresponding to the map locations to represent the 16 colors on the c64...
Let me know if I can send you screen shots via email or another way so you can see what I mean...