RetroEdit: Cleaning up.

Okay, back to real work again.... I'm cleaning up my RetroBitmap control and converting the rest of the application to use it, which is taking a little longer than planned. I now also have to re-evaluate whether I want to have a per-sprite HIRES/MCM switch. While not really important for a C64/Plus4 it might be down the line if I decided to add Amiga editing and add a "number of colours" mode. This might mean you couldn't edit 16 and 32 colour sprites in the same project. However, changing each sprite can be a pain depending on what your doing. I'm still not sure how I'll handle this, but Im edging towards each sprite still having their own mode.

The Control now renders everything correctly and I can now play animations back as before, although I've still to add the all important keyboard short-cuts. The control can now also be any size (although, there may be invalid combinations like a 13x13 in MCM etc.) and can render to any size bitmap. The bitmap is public so that you can replicate it in other controls; I for example scale it and use it to display the various sizes of the sprite without having to re-render it. I hope to add some sort of custom exporter-pluging system (at somepoint) so you can save your own formats. I was reading the discussion on WorldOfSpectrum forums and they were talking about a funny zig-zag format. I'll try and add all the common ones from the start, and then let you do plugin's for any new formats.

All this is pretty far down the line....Possibly even after XeO3 is finished. Also, I plan to save everything in some sort of IFF format (project files that is) so that they are easy to disect; if anyone else has an opinion, nows the time to object. I was considering just using some of C#'s native serializing stuff, but I want folk to be able to extract stuff from it if then need to.

Oh...and one last thing..... Do people just want a load of sprites that the can "view" as animations, or do they want a list of anims that the program orginises nicely for them? Just now I have (say) 167 sprites, and I set IN and OUT points and then view the anims. This is very easy to use, but it means I cant set up say a "baddie" animation and save out delays etc. But usually these numbers are different for each program so its not worth it..... anyone have an opinion on that?