Background

Hey everyone!

A week or two ago I found myself on a long trip with not much to do and decided to try my hand at a TI-BASIC program using the new Celtic CE library. It's been awhile since I worked on a TI-BASIC program and it brought back a lot of memories! (Along with reminding me why I hate using TI-BASIC )

Anyways, I had initially planned on making a game, but on-calc sprite creating was a huge pain without a proper program to do it. Long story short, instead of making a game I made a sprite editor!

The code is most certainly not the best, but the program works and isn't too slow, so who really cares

Eye Candy



What can it do?

Spriter offers a nice, minimalist interface for editing sprites using both the xLibC and BufSprite (OS color) palettes. You can create sprites anywhere between 1×1 and 128×128, though keep in mind that loading a 128×128 sprite takes a significantly long time. In the editor, you can zoom in and out, choose different colors, erase and place pixels, anything basic you'd expect from an on-calc editor. Spriter offers two different export options, where you can either save your sprite to a string variable you can recall into a program to use later, or insert the sprite as an icon into a TI-BASIC program (Provided it uses the BufSprite palette and is 16×16).

Download
You can download Spriter from GitHub, or from Cemetech if you'd like. If you're using this program, make sure to install the Celtic CE library first!

Enjoy!

Looks pretty nice! I like the interface a lot. One thing I would be concerned about though is that the cursor appears to just be a square in the currently selected color--wouldn't that make it impossible to see when filling large areas with the same color? I maybe would replace it with a simple white, black, or red outline instead that's aware of the color behind it so it can change color to be visible when necessary.

Anyway, nice work and I look forward to trying it out once it's uploaded to the archives!

That's a great suggestion and definitely something that wouldn't be too difficult to do either. I'd probably aim towards a black border, and switch it to white when needed to contrast. Thanks for the feedback

That looks great, nice work! I was trying to remember some comps that I've previously seen, and while it appears that I hallucinating tifreak8x having created a hybrid BASIC sprite editor, I did accurately recall Frederick's Designer program (https://www.cemetech.net/downloads/files/2128/x2456). There's always space for various tools for the job, so people can pick the one that they like best, but I'm also curious to understand where you feel Spriter particularly excels.

TIFreak does indeed have an icon creator which should work on the TI-84 Plus CE. It's good, but only works for icons. Frederik's designer program is wonderful and definitely a big recommend from me, even over this, though because it's written in ICE it can experience a lot of crashes at times and requires a version of the C libraries that's a few versions older, making it sadly somewhat impractical to use.

I've always used ICE sprite creator by calclover2514 and CalcMeister, although its only supports xLibC. https://www.cemetech.net/downloads/files/1889/x1889. I'll definitely try this one out.

Funnily enough, this was going to be one of the steps I was going to take for making progress on my projects. Might still poke around with it, might just use this. It looks pretty good!

I'm going to assume the readme tells you how to use the program, but it might be nice to have what keys does what displayed, like where you're selecting the size of the sprite to work with and such.

So I finally found some sprites I thought I'd try to translate over to the calc manually (for testing purposes) and.. I can't use Spriter. When I press the arrows, it gives me an "Error: Version". I'm going to assume that it's complaining about OS version? I'm running 5.0.1.0012.

I'd assume that's got to be it because I believe it does use some "newer" TI-BASIC tokens like eval( and such which I think weren't added until 5.2.x (maybe even 5.3.0?).

I personally prefer using 5.3.0 on my older CE, since it also lets you run archived programs (so you can essentially create a near 3 MB large pure TI-BASIC game). 5.3.1 disables Asm84CEPrgm and AsmComp(). They still show up but with a strikeout and cannot be selected in the catalog so only Asm() remain. 5.5.1 and higher removes Asm() altogether so you need ArTIfiCE, CabriJr and AsmHook. Unfortunately I cannot downgrade my newer CE so I had no choice but to use ArTIfiCE. I don't need AsmHook anymore because I can launch ASM programs from Celtic CE commands.

Yeah, I found one of my CEs with 5.4, so I'll switch over to that calculator for my development