Quadtastic - A tool to manage sprite sheets and color palettes

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0x25a0
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Quadtastic - A tool to manage sprite sheets and color palettes

Post by 0x25a0 »

tl;dr: Check out Quadtastic and let me know what you think :)
https://25a0.itch.io/quadtastic

Image

Heya! First post, and first serious lua and Love2D project.
Something that bugged me when using quads in Love was that you had to type out the coordinates and dimensions manually. Over time, the idea for a tool to solve this inconvenience grew in my mind, and the result of that is Quadtastic.

It's a simple tool that tries to do one thing: It lets you specify quads directly on your sprite sheet so that you can refer to sprites by name, rather than by coordinates.

For the full list of features, check out the itch.io page.
Documentation is on GitHub, but still a bit rough...
There's an example project to give you a rough idea of how using Quadtastic affects your source code.
It's free, open source, and MIT licensed.

Now, a full-blown app might seem like a bit of an overkill for the small inconvenience that Quadtastic wants to solve, but I learned a lot about lua and Love in the process, wrote my own little immediate-mode GUI library, and I want to get into the habit of actually publishing my side-projects, so here it is.

There are a few things I want to add in the near future. In particular, I'd like to add a "strip" feature that generates a strip of similar quads. I imagine that this could be useful for animations and pixel fonts. However, how I implement this depends on your feedback. I want to make Quadtastic a smooth, non-disruptive part of your workflow, and I have too little experience myself to judge that.
Also, depending on the feedback I will add more export types so that Quadtastic can be used for more than just Love projects. But we'll see. Edit: Starting with Quadtastic 0.6, you can now export your quads as JSON or XML, and you can even write your own exporters if you need more flexibility.

I'd greatly appreciate to hear what you think, and I hope that the first comment won't be "oh you should have checked out X, it does exactly that!" :D
Last edited by 0x25a0 on Fri Jul 28, 2017 3:47 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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yetneverdone
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Re: Quadtastic - A tool to manage sprite sheets and color palettes

Post by yetneverdone »

Looks great! Very awesome project. It would really be useful
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0x25a0
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Re: Quadtastic - A tool to manage sprite sheets and color palettes

Post by 0x25a0 »

Damn so apparently downloading doesn't really work on itch.io while the tool is not public, even with a secret link.
For anyone who tried to download it before and it didn't work: Sorry! It should be working now though.

@yetneverdone thanks for the feedback, I'm glad to hear that :)
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Re: Quadtastic - A tool to manage sprite sheets and color palettes

Post by modog »

Very good work!
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Atavismus
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Re: Quadtastic - A tool to manage sprite sheets and color palettes

Post by Atavismus »

Trying it now: it's very neat and useful!
Thx for that tool. :)

One idea: it could "quick" to be able to edit a group name by double click on it.
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0x25a0
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Re: Quadtastic - A tool to manage sprite sheets and color palettes

Post by 0x25a0 »

Thanks a lot for the feedback, @modog and @Atavismus!
One idea: it could "quick" to be able to edit a group name by double click on it.
I like the idea :) I'll try to add that to the next version.
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Re: Quadtastic - A tool to manage sprite sheets and color palettes

Post by D0NM »

0x25a0, it is a nice tool.
I like auto-centering on a quad, zoom-in/out and opening its export files.

For the same stuff I have altered an open source SpriteCow (JavaScript). I've added a custom export.
Image https://github.com/jakearchibald/sprite-cow

Here are 2 ideas (not the requests ;) )

1) Quadtastic is missing a custom output to adapt your great tool for old projects needs easily.
I don't have any special suggestions yet. It might be another "custom export" button
which iterates the listed quads to some "user's module".

2) Why don't you use a relative path to the image?
e.g. I moved images to another drive and cannot open the export.lua file.

Thanks again, for making the things more easy :awesome:
Our LÖVE Gamedev blog Zabuyaki (an open source retro beat 'em up game). Twitter: @Zabuyaki.
:joker: LÖVE & Lua Video Lessons in Russian / Видео уроки по LÖVE и Lua :joker:
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Re: Quadtastic - A tool to manage sprite sheets and color palettes

Post by 0x25a0 »

Thanks for the ideas, @D0NM :)
D0NM wrote: Thu Jun 08, 2017 4:42 pm 1) Quadtastic is missing a custom output to adapt your great tool for old projects needs easily.
I don't have any special suggestions yet. It might be another "custom export" button
which iterates the listed quads to some "user's module".
Absolutely! There is a discussion about this on the issue tracker on GitHub: https://github.com/25A0/Quadtastic/issues/1
The plan is to provide exporters for common formats like xml and json out of the box, but also allow users to write their own exporters.
I've started to work on this, but I'm quite busy atm, so not sure when it will be finished.
D0NM wrote: Thu Jun 08, 2017 4:42 pm 2) Why don't you use a relative path to the image?
e.g. I moved images to another drive and cannot open the export.lua file.
Whoops. Yeah that should really be a relative path. Thanks :) I've added it to the issue tracker.
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Re: Quadtastic - A tool to manage sprite sheets and color palettes

Post by D0NM »

btw. Have u tried to run yer itcio's .LOVE
I think, you've forgotten to add lfs.dll in it.

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Our LÖVE Gamedev blog Zabuyaki (an open source retro beat 'em up game). Twitter: @Zabuyaki.
:joker: LÖVE & Lua Video Lessons in Russian / Видео уроки по LÖVE и Lua :joker:
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Re: Quadtastic - A tool to manage sprite sheets and color palettes

Post by 0x25a0 »

There should be a note on the download page that the .love version requires LFS to be installed. But it seems like that note is easy to miss, so I'll add a more in-your-face warning :)

If you have luarocks installed, then

Code: Select all

luarocks install luafilesystem
should do the trick. If that doesn't work, let me know :)

Edit: Just out of curiosity, why do you prefer to use the .love version instead of the binary version that is available for Windows?
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