Featured download.

Posted:: 30 May 2005 at 20:38

This month’s featured download is TilesetPal, by Monolith.

It’s a great program. It fixes one of the most annoying problems you’ll face while making a tileset – color reduction. Unless you’re really good at it, color reduction will result in one of three things – a slightly worse looking set, a much worse looking set, and a downright repulsive looking set. With the help of TilesetPal, you can make a slightly worse looking set in a matter of minutes, palette events included.

I tested this program on a tileset that used about 6,000 colors, and it looked almost perfect when finished. It took about two minutes in all, too. With this program, not only can you do easy color reduction for tilesets, but it will also help to make basic palettes for your sets so you don’t have to do the annoying copy & paste work with other programs. This means people no longer have an excuse for not including palette events in their tilesets. Yay! =D

The only major problem I found with this program is that it has somewhat buggy .pcx support. I loaded a .pcx file, and it got completely distorted. I converted it to .bmp and then it worked fine. Also, having to download that file from Microsoft was an inconvenience, but nothing too bad. I can’t say the same for people with 56K though, since the file was 20-something megabytes.

In conclusion, this program is the best thing to happen to tileset makers since DTR. Quick and easy, useful, and it works great. Couldn’t ask for more.

Click here to see an example of how well this program can work. The quality of the picture’s not so good since it’s a .jpg, but it should give you a basic idea of what it can do. The image on the right in the screenshot could, at that state, be used as a tileset in JJ2, while the one on the left has too many colors. See much of a difference?

- Labratkid

Comments

EvilMonkey on 30 May 2005 at 20:41

Two minutes? Bah, I’d rather use Paint Shop Pro.

EvilMike on 31 May 2005 at 01:28

Good idea, that way it can look really ugly. This program takes longer because it does a much better job. PSP’s colour reduction methods suck.

Tover on 31 May 2005 at 14:42

is this a tileset maker? it can decomplie j2t files? i need this function!

DanYjel on 31 May 2005 at 15:02

What about read article first, Tover?

EvilMonkey on 31 May 2005 at 20:14

Quote:

“This program takes longer because it does a much better job. PSP’s colour reduction methods suck.”

I suppose you haven’t checked the radio button that says “color dithering”, have you?

EvilMonkey on 31 May 2005 at 20:16

…but then again, this might save a lot of time doing palette work because it incorporates the static palette for you.

Violet CLM on 31 May 2005 at 21:10

Dithering is a mixed bag. Sometimes it will make something look better, often it will make something worse. Without this program, the best method might be to figure out what parts of the tileset are best reduced in which ways, and then seperate them for independant reduction processes.

Lark on 1 Jun 2005 at 19:43

Yes, pretty much what Violet said. I would never use dithering for a tileset, but if I were reducing a photo to 256 colors (God only knows why I would do that), I would definetely use dithering. Dithering creates the illusion that something is better quality than it is, especially at high resolutions.

Monolith on 2 Jun 2005 at 03:41

Thank you lark for featuring my program. I hope people manage to find it useful. I have looked into the PCX loading bug you mentioned, and got that fixed for the next version. I’m hoping to catch as many bugs and important features as I can so I only have to release one more version to cover all of it. So.. I’ll take bug reports and feature requests for a while. ;o (And hopefully I’ll have the time to work on them.)

Ragnarok! on 5 Jun 2005 at 17:08

Huge Question :

Why only when someone popular uploads something, there is only a feature then. When there is a month without any really popular uploaders, no feature, even if there is an OKAY – GOOD level? =P

Lark on 5 Jun 2005 at 18:35

I don’t chose based on popularity, I just chose the best. Generally, people who’ve been in the community longer get better at making levels, tilesets, etc. and at the same time get more popular.

Violet CLM on 7 Jun 2005 at 07:40

And ignore any rumors that Labra waited on posting the feature until there was an upload by an author he approved of.

Ragnarok! on 7 Jun 2005 at 18:54

It was a question I was unsure of, is that a problem to you? If you are not referring to me, I am sorry.

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