{"id":33,"date":"2017-12-05T12:34:36","date_gmt":"2017-12-05T12:34:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wieringsoftware.com\/ts2\/?page_id=33"},"modified":"2022-09-19T15:30:48","modified_gmt":"2022-09-19T15:30:48","slug":"features","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.wieringsoftware.com\/ts2\/features\/","title":{"rendered":"Features"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the old days, graphics artists had to work with lots of limitations (limited color depth, maximum number of colors on the screen at the same time, memory sizes, resolution), but still were able to make amazing looking pixel art games.<\/p>\n

You could save a lot of memory by splitting up graphics into little tiles and reusing those with different color palettes. This results in far less work than drawing a complete level in pixels and usually results in more consistency in the graphics overall.<\/p>\n

Tile Studio II aims to help you produce high quality pixel art graphics, but without the kinds of limitations that the early artists faced. It lets you make little tiles which can be used in different colors and combine those into a tilesheet, with which you can draw your maps.<\/p>\n

Palettes<\/h1>\n

Tile Studio II works with indexed graphics. Whenever you draw a pixel, you don’t actually draw an absolute color value, but a pointer to a position in a color palette. If you would later change the palette at that position, the color in your drawing will change too.<\/p>\n

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Tile Studio II works with gradients so you don’t need to define each color individually. You can define a gradient with just one color, like the grey below. Only the center color was defined as 128, 128, 128 (red, green, blue), and the delta<\/em> (difference to each next color) as 28, 28, 28, which produces a smooth gradient from black to white.<\/p>\n

\"\"The second gradient (green) is also defined by just one color, but the delta has different values for red, green and blue to make the lighter part more yellowish.<\/p>\n

As you can see in the third gradient, you can place lots of different colors and the gradient will make a smooth transition to them. You can also place two different colors next to each other, like in the forth gradient.<\/p>\n

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A palette index can also be between two colors in your palette. As you can see here, when you select a range of colors, you get a smoother gradient of that range with more intermediate colors to choose from (however, if you do want to limit yourself to the colors in your palette, you can do so in the tile designer by setting precision<\/em> to 1).<\/p>\n

More information: Palette Editor<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Bitmaps and the Pixel Editor<\/h1>\n

Tile Studio II works differently than most tile \/ map editors. There are actually two layers of tiles. Instead of using tiles from your bitmap to draw to the map, you use them to construct your actual tilesheet. This way you end up having to draw less pixels and can reuse the same drawings several times in your tilesheet.<\/p>\n

Here is an example of a bitmap (the pixels you draw), a tilesheet (created from the bitmap) and a map (using tiles from the tilesheet):<\/p>\n

\"bitmap\"\"tilesheet\" \"map\"<\/p>\n

The bitmap you use is generally very small. You can edit it with the pixel editor. You can make a selection of tiles to edit simultaneously, like 3 x 2 tiles in this example:<\/p>\n

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Tile Studio II has the option Only One Gradient per Tile<\/em> in the Tile<\/em> menu. If checked, whenever you choose a color from the palette, the drawing in the bitmap editor will be remapped to the gradient you are using. It’s good practice to only use one gradient in each tile. You can combine them later in layers in your tilesheet and then you can change the colors for each layer.<\/p>\n

There is a pattern viewer to let you see the a repeated version of the tile (or area) you are drawing so that you can easily make your tiles seamless:<\/p>\n

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You can set up areas in your bitmap for animations. This allows you to easily cycle through the frames using the keyboard so that you can see how the animation will look.<\/p>\n

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More information: Bitmaps\u00a0<\/a>and Pixel Editor<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Tilesheets and the Tile Designer<\/h1>\n

In the tilesheet you can design your tiles that you will be using to draw in your maps. You can construct each tile from blocks you draw in your bitmap. You can combine them in layers and use lots of parameters to modify them.<\/p>\n

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Using the designer may take some time to get used to. You could look at the designer as the editor for the current selection of the tilesheet. See the example below (using the selection in the tilesheet above):<\/p>\n

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The designer has two rows, at the top you see the layers of the selected tile from bottom to top (In this example the second layer is used as alpha multiplier so the black area is erased). In the bottom row you see (from left to right):<\/p>\n