Icon Editor : East/West Auto Mirror

ID:97332
 
Jun 23 2010, 5:53 am (Edited on Jun 23 2010, 10:02 am)
Applies to:Dream Maker
Status: Open
Issue hasn't been assigned a status value.
What do you think of an option for the icon editor to automatically mirror the East/West states?
It could be toggled with a simple check-box. DM would still allow you to edit frames like you do now, but any changes to an East frame would automatically be reflected in the West one, and vise-versa.
Or it could just completely hide the West set of frames.

I could see a possible problem with this. If you have custom East/West frames, and hit the Mirror button - accidentally erasing/overwriting them.
Jun 23 2010, 6:17 am (Edited on Jun 23 2010, 10:05 am)
On a somewhat related note: It could make sense to move the "Movement State" check-box from the edit state window into the frame editor with all of the other settings. The "State Name" input could also be moved there.
Jun 23 2010, 6:23 am
Oh also, I think I posted it somewhere before, but the "<- Back" button is anchored to the right side of the screen, which sends it over to never never land on large/wide resolutions.
Having it stay somewhere near the rest of the settings/in its default position would probably be better.
Jun 23 2010, 10:00 am
GREAT IDEA, I second this
Jun 23 2010, 2:09 pm
Ryuk25 wrote:
GREAT IDEA, I second this

So do I. It would be a good idea to "store" the custom East/West frames when the mirror option is activated and delete them once the user hits the "<- Back" button. Kind of what happens when you decrease the frames in the animation.
Jun 23 2010, 2:26 pm
This would be very useful if implemented right, especially for large icons when you might have a smaller walking state, but a larger other state (This would make the need to offset the walking states and add a little extra work when trying to flip them perfectly around for the east/west).
Jun 24 2010, 12:47 am
or you could just select the four states together and replace the four blank states with what your using, then just use the vertical flip tool in each frame. won't take you more than 20 seconds while asking to do this would make them work for at least an hour on it. (maybe less, I dunno how good they are).

besides that, if you just click mirror then it would also have to mirror the north and south states, as some would want that feature..
Jun 24 2010, 3:17 am (Edited on Jun 24 2010, 3:50 am)
Bravo1 wrote:
or you could just select the four states together and replace the four blank states with what your using, then just use the vertical flip tool in each frame. won't take you more than 20 seconds while asking to do this would make them work for at least an hour on it. (maybe less, I dunno how good they are).

20 seconds * 20 states * 200 icons = 22 Hours.
I'd say the 1 hour of work they put in makes up for the almost 1 day of work that a single project I'm working on would take. Not to mention all the other people and the countless other projects.
Plus its crazy tedious to go into hundreds of frames, edit 1 pixel, then have to do the exact same for the opposite direction - or copy paste flip for bigger changes.

If nothing else for this argument of yours: They need mass modify tools. So that I can at least flip those 4 frames at the same time. Instead of having to click 6x more than is necessary in varying locations.

If, for some reason, they're against this idea (I can't understand how anyone is, but apparently...) then they could add a function that has been requested multiple times before, to get all available information about an icon_state, and then I'll go ahead and build my own icon editor.

besides that, if you just click mirror then it would also have to mirror the north and south states, as some would want that feature..

Very rarely, if ever (though maybe something similar in ISO), do your North and South states mirror each other. However, the East and West ones almost always do.
Jun 24 2010, 5:41 am
As you mentioned in your last comment, I think mass modify tools would be the way to go. Being able to apply a shift, rotation, or flip to a whole set of states at once would be a huge convenience.
Jun 24 2010, 5:54 am
Also, could you apply the background color of the icon to the entire editor?
Its kind of a pain to have to click in to every single frame to tell if the white pixels are white, or if its empty space.
Jun 25 2010, 6:14 pm
Falacy wrote:

Plus its crazy tedious to go into hundreds of frames, edit 1 pixel, then have to do the exact same for the opposite direction - or copy paste flip for bigger changes.

If nothing else for this argument of yours: They need mass modify tools.


I completely agree with this. This would be a very useful feature, and would save me quite abit of time, especially when it comes to things like overlays.

Sep 24 2010, 2:38 pm
I recently posted and a deleted a similar request. (Thank you for the heads-up, Falacy.)

However, the point of my post was that the result should not be pasted in. The options in the file (whether compiled or built through an /icon) should be enough for Dream Seeker to present the correct image. Frankly, the file size increase from redundant frames has always been an issue and the larger resolution options have made it worse.

In other words, I'd like to set directions as turned, flipped and shifted clones of other directions without adding new pixels. (And I wouldn't limit it to East/West. I actually have even more redundancies from my top-down games where only one direction should be necessary for a 4-directional icon and 2 for an 8-directional one.)