Baby girl on the way!!!
Thank you all for sticking it through the dry spells of lack of updates. This is partially since my life has become so busy. My wife is 8 months pregnant, and I have been a bit busy taking care of her and my son. With all of the preparations for our little girl I have carved out some chunks of my time to many Quality of Life improvements to Game Pencil and many to the PawGUI.
Geometric Rendering
I have also been experimenting with updating geometric based rendering. Although the Renderer is hardware accelerated there is sometimes some topics that are difficult to graps and perfect and although I join many Q&A groups and discords, some users are unaware or unsure how to do some render calls.
Using a map from SNES mario kart I was able to finally understand more about texture coordinate points to create a circular version of an image. That took about 3 days to figure out lol.
PawGUI upgrades
Pictured aboe are some of the improvements made to PawGui:
- Paneled Sections
This was a cool feature and is definitely helpful for data intensive editors such as the scene, object, sprite and tilesheets. To reducing the need for scrolling you will be able to simply hide and unhide elements within the section now.
- Improved Asset / Resource Manager
I just love this feature as it did indeed cut down on the complexity of this class. It also beautified it more. There are now 5 options to view resources. From the traditional list view, to small to extra large icons. One of the best features also added to this was the ability to easily search resources. Finally in the class I have added the ability to stay within one folder only versus the entire Workspace of Projects.
- Image Transparency
I'm glad I finally got around to this feature. I have been defaulting to 255,0,255 that I forgot that many other tilesheets have varying transparent colors for their images. Of course images till have alpha values, but many tilesheets, spritesheets and textures depend on transparent image colors.
- Audio Editor Improvements:
Although still a work in progress. I have been dealing more time with conveying data about audio files within the editor. At the moment I have added a way to calculate the estimated length of an audio track. Next I plan to also have a visual preview of an audio file ( Similar to audacity or Windows Media Player). This may result eventually in no longer using SDL_Mixer for the SDL backend, but only time will tell.
Image / Pixel Manipulation:
-So far included is grayscaling, sephia toning images, removing HSV/RGB ranges, highlighting HSV/RGB ranges, inverting color, monochroming images, 2Bit-ifying images and color merging.
Finally I have studied many methods to edit image pixel values to create various effects without using shaders. Implementation within the engine itself will be up to the user, but for now I have added a secondary texture people can toggle between. Please note this may result in more memory and GPU usage.
And last but not least
Sprite stacking , mode-7, raycasting, psuedo3D and view mode toggling. As a gamer and retro-gamer at heart I am digging deep in code to enable these options as engine based functions versus needing to recreate this on a per project basis.
Thank you for all of the support. There is so much left to go, but I'm working every second I can. I barely even boot up my next-gen consoles or Steam/Epic Games Store these days.
I hope to be able to share even more before the month is over.
Until next time,
Nathan Hurde