Display stuffing up.

[Jam0864]

My friend just got SGDK and after about 3 minutes in the tileset editor it stuffs up. The screen goes black unless moving the mouse. Black and white squares show wherever the mouse has been and the screen flashes a light gray colour every second. He is using a laptop if that matters. I don't know his video card or anything like that and he doesn't either. Any help on this would be great.

[bluemonkmn]

The tileset editor in version 1.x seems to be unusually sensitive to video driver bugs.  All I can suggest is to check for updated video drivers.  SGDK2 should not have this problem because it uses a windowed tileset editor, but SGDK2, of course, is not quite ready for release yet.  You can kinda make games with it already, though... if you're clever.

If all else fails, just edit graphics externally and use the import feature (Import Tile and Load Image can both be used to import external graphics) to import the graphics into GameDev.

[eric22222]

I've had that problem before, and I've found a quick fix: if you press the "store" button, the screen should stop blinking. Just make sure you aren't on a tile when you do that. Like, choose a blank tile before pressing store.

[Jam0864]

Cool. We'll try it out next time I see him.

[bluemonkmn]

Oh, if you're talking about the flickering problem, that's documented here:
http://sourceforge.net/docman/display_doc.php?docid=6094&group_id=9970

The last bullet suggests using the "Reset" button above the color palette.

[Jam0864]

The screen flickers, if you don't move the mouse the screen goes completely black and a whole lot of squares show up near the mouse.  It's so bad that once it happens it is almost impossible to draw because you can't see what you're doing.  But hitting the store button fixes the problem for about 10 minutes so it isn't that big a deal now. Thanks for helping! 

[sam]

I see you're problem's been solved but, try TileStudio.

Edit: I see the websites down...or maybe it's just my comp...

[Jam0864]

I've got tilestudio and I hate it!  I'd rather use MS Paint. I like SGDK's tileset editor because of the smoothing, 360* spin thing and anti-aliasing.  I also like not having to go into the menus at the top of the screen, it has all the buttons on the screen. 

[sam]

Wow...
Well if you'd rather use Paint then you obviously didn't give TS much of a chance...

[eric22222]

Well, I have found that TS's palette is really difficult to operate. Getting a gradient between two colors requires one to search the palette for that one pixel, and click it the right number of times. The lack of rotation tools is also pretty annoying. I think the only ways that TS has the GameDev editor beat is in the random fill tool and being able to see how a tile looks in a group. Though neither have the option to edit two adjacent tiles at once, which would make backgrounds alot easier...

[sam]

Random fill is a big thing, but also being able to select more than one color at once and drawing a shape with more than one color, along with lighting.

[bluemonkmn]

How many of you have tried the SGDK2 graphics editor?  I think it has the best of all these and handles all features mentioned above, but if there's anything I've missed, now would be the time to tell me about it!

[eric22222]

I just tried it out, and love it. Usually I use a combination of GameDev's editor and Photoshop CS2 for my graphics. Some things I need to go to Photoshop for (that I didn't see in SGDK2) and some things that might just be nice:

• Hue and Saturation editor - You know those little spinning icons I had for powerups in my game? There were six different colors of 'em. It took me plenty of time to get the first one done, but the next five were done in a few minutes with some adjusting of the hue.
• A truckload of hotkeys - In Photoshop, if you press anything on the keyboard, somethings going to happen. In fact, if you even think about pressing something, the entire program will quiver in anticipation. My personal favorite is using "x" to swap your primary and secondaray colors.
• Random fill - Though mentioned above, it's worth restating. Photoshop has more of a "Add Noise" filter that gives a little imperfection to those solid tiles.

That's just what I can think of now... If I come up with anything else I'll let you know.

[bluemonkmn]

Those look like good ideas -- particularly useful to designing tiles and sprites.  I'll add them to my list and see if I can figure out how the heck to implement them .

[bat]

hey ben, different editing layers too!