So a related idea I had here this morning, while thinking about the long-term plan for burying improving on FEditor. My grand plan for a while has been to have some kind of suite of “content creation” tools that use a GUI (except for things like text scripts, since an ordinary text editor is just fine there), and then do the actual fun work of inserting and ripping separately by feeding the created “resource” files to another tool cough nm3 cough. My thinking is that conceptually separating “create the data” from “interact with the ROM” as much as possible, will allow for cleaner design.
What I’m thinking now is that a full suite of “FE graphics content creation” tools could be pieced together from a combination of
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This project
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@Nintenlord’s GBAGE (probably keeping the bit that extracts graphics from ROMs, but skipping the part that writes them back)
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Some simple pixel-level editing tools
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An FEditor-inspired portrait viewer (instead of having the 128x112 spritesheet format, I was thinking of having it just take in several pictures showing all the mouth/eye variations, and having it automatically detect the differences, create mouth/eye sprites and pack together a sheet).
The idea being that each tool would save some kind of resource dump (likely involving JSON) that included the necessary palette and bitmap binary data (maybe with some human-readable encoding) and enough metadata to figure out what’s what.
The especially convenient part here is that the first three things on the list are already c# VS projects.