Topic: Recommended programs to assist your mapping

[JonLeung]

This list of useful programs will be edited on an ongoing basis as more suggested programs are brought to our attention.



Image Organization

CompuPic Pro - I've been using this for years.  Good for basic (and advanced) browsing and organization.  And basic editing, too.  Has some helpful functions like auto-crop, batch conversion and renaming, keywords and categories for sorting, screensavers, slideshows, picture indexes, changing the time and date of files, looking inside .ZIPs easily, and finding out what type a file really is.  It can do a lot (I'm still finding things that it can do), all you need to do is click around.



Font Making

Bitmap Font Writer - Incredibly useful if you want to label your maps, but only want to do so with the game's own font.  Or any custom font you may want to create, really.



Image Checking

Revned's Tile Slicer/Splicer - If you make your maps as nice rectangles with dimensions that are multiples of 16, these programs will slice them up into all its unique 16 x 16 tiles.  You can then replace tiles that aren't the same (but should be) with ones that are and then splice them back together for a perfect map.

Revned's Tile Slicer (latest version, 1.1) - added May 2008, Splicer to come.



Image Compression

PNGGauntlet - I've been using this on every .PNG submitted to me, and nearly always am able to shrink them down.  Depending on what you use to edit your .PNGs, this could shrink the filesize by quite a lot without affecting the image.  Use this after you have no more editing to do on your map.

[Revned]

Maybe you should add my Tile Slicer/Splicer programs to the list.

[JonLeung]

I was thinking about those two, too.



What's the official name for them?  And where can we download them again?

[Revned]

That's the real name. Never thought of anything better. The old download URL still works: http://www.geocities.com/revned22/0.5.zip

[Revned]

Ooh yay! Bitmap Font Writer runs on my new computer. I got one of those Intel Macs. Now I don't have to piece my titles together letter by letter

[JonLeung]

I'm finding that by checking on "Brute force compression" in PNGGauntlet, I can compress .PNGs even more!  o_0

[TerraEsperZ]

Unfortunately, PNGGauntlet won't work on my computer since my copy of Win XP isn't exactly legal, which means that the VisualBasic .Net thing it requires won't install.



I'd like to add Irfanview (http://www.irfanview.com/) in the Image Organization category. It can be used  for batch conversions and alterations but was I really like is that it's incredibly easy to browse the images in a directory when copying them in your paint program by using Space and Backspace to go to the next or previous image.



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"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censored, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably." [...] The first time any man's freedom is trodden on, we're all damaged. - Captain Jean-Luc Picard



B*tch, meet reality. Reality, meet b*tch. - Me

[Grizzly]

You can still use Ken's regular PNGOUT program which PNGGauntlet is built on. It is a command line based program, but creating a link file and just putting the image name in there works like a charm for me. You can only convert one image at a time but I never happen to finish more than one map a day so that's no problem for me

http://advsys.net/ken/ - Click on Utility Page

[TerraEsperZ]

Thanks. Irfanview has a PNGOUT plugin when saving to PNG but it has way too many options and it can take a long time to convert a large map. Anyway, I'll try it out.



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"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censored, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably." [...] The first time any man's freedom is trodden on, we're all damaged. - Captain Jean-Luc Picard



B*tch, meet reality. Reality, meet b*tch. - Me

[Brainfire2008]

http://pagesperso-orange.fr/pierre.g/xnview/ennewsgroup.html



The freeware Xnview has the option to create strip of images !



wich can helpful.



http://pagesperso-orange.fr/pierre.g/xnview/endownloadwin32.html

[JonLeung]

Revned updated the Slicer.  Link is in the first post.

[vorpal86]

I may try tile slicer and see what benefits it has. I like to set my maps in a nice 16x16 fashion. I was about to post xNView cause it's a nice viewer/organizer/Editor. I been using it for a while.



I've just recompressed a map here with PNGGauntlet and gained back 8.6kb. Not bad. I'm going over it to see what differences the two are in quality.



Does PNGGauntlet work like; Taking a file and removing duplicate colors that have the same RGB value? Or just compress the file better without reducing the color quality? When working with 8bit plain 256 color images I normally remove duplicate colors manually, or those colors that are near identical and were just the same color only pasted in with a different value.



I'm sure PNGG would work best with 24bit png images cause it would be very tedious to remove duplicate colors in 24bit.

[Revned]

I'm actually planning on redoing the whole interface (again) to bring the slicer and splicer together, as well as another cool feature I've played around with. I probably won't get to it for awhile, though.



I've had some success manually reducing image palettes before compressing them. For example, my Koholint Island map went from 312 KB down to 188 KB. I'd imagine the effects aren't so drastic when the palette is larger, but in this case it helped a lot.

[Maxim]

PNGOUT works by doing a more intensive search for high compression, and also by dropping unneeded parts of the file (eg. metadata), and trying to re-order/optimise the palette to give more compressible data. It can also reduce the bit depth in cases where it is lossless (eg. reducing a 200-colour 24-bit image to an 8-bit paletted image). It is possible to gain more by brute-force iteration through other parameters (eg. some 4-bit images compress better at 8bpp) but it's generally too slow to bother with that. In all cases, it is always lossless.



The slicer/splicer can be useful, especially for finding mistakes, but I find the sheer volume of tiles hard to manage; a GUI might help there.

[Revned]

Maxim Said:

PNGOUT works by doing a more intensive search for high compression, and also by dropping unneeded parts of the file (eg. metadata), and trying to re-order/optimise the palette to give more compressible data. It can also reduce the bit depth in cases where it is lossless (eg. reducing a 200-colour 24-bit image to an 8-bit paletted image). It is possible to gain more by brute-force iteration through other parameters (eg. some 4-bit images compress better at 8bpp) but it's generally too slow to bother with that. In all cases, it is always lossless.



The slicer/splicer can be useful, especially for finding mistakes, but I find the sheer volume of tiles hard to manage; a GUI might help there.

Indeed. That's one of the major features I plan on implementing. It will shade the image according to tile frequency, so the uncommon ones will stand out.