AuthorTopic: Cosmigo Pro Motion tips?  (Read 28061 times)

Offline ptoing

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Re: Cosmigo Pro Motion tips?

Reply #10 on: January 28, 2011, 11:04:28 pm
You can either press the little D at the top which creates duplicates if you copy paste tiles around, or better yet turn of Sync Mode. Then you can just draw new shit and nothing gets updated until you turn sync mode on again. ALSO, NEVER SAVE WITHOUT SYNC MODE OFF AND LEAVE PROMOTION. This does not really break your file but it corrupts it and you have to go into it's guts (PMP files are really just renamed zips)

No tile palette zooming atm, but it is in the list of of todos
The width restriction is not in the todo but I will tell Jan next time I send a bug report. :)
There are no ugly colours, only ugly combinations of colours.

Offline AnnIshman

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Re: Cosmigo Pro Motion tips?

Reply #11 on: January 29, 2011, 06:05:16 pm
Do it, I say.

OK. Ok.

Here is the shortcut list from the help.

Shortcut List

I believe the first step is to trim down to the most useful commands. Multiple sheets may be necessary (novice, advanced, etc). I've started to trim them down, but opinions on what should be removed/kept would be nice to hear.

I took a stab at using icons, but I think there will be some commands that will be very difficult to communicate with an 8x8-ish icon. I made it white background figuring it would be nice to be able to print it and not eat a bunch of ink. I don't know if I would say this is the step in the right direction, but it certainly is a step.

« Last Edit: February 01, 2011, 01:35:56 am by AnnIshman »

Offline dock

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Re: Cosmigo Pro Motion tips?

Reply #12 on: February 01, 2011, 10:41:14 am
AnnIrishman, I think this is a great start.

Some other things I discovered recently:

Shift +/- resize your brush, but don't damage it like halving/doubling will.  
This is really handy for me, as I work this way in Photoshop all the time, resizing my brush as I go.

J Toggle spare frame.
I'm finding this pretty handy, especially if I want to quickly make a tileable texture. It's useful to have a separate doc that shares my palette and other settings, so I can just try stuff out.

I'm starting to love the tilemap feature, but also it drives me crazy. I need to figure out how to implement it into a pipeline, especially as it seems hell bent on moving my tiles around. I've tried to lay them out manually and re-import them, but it always flips out in these cases. I suspect I'll have to learn more about this process to get it working.  I'm also curious as to whether I'll be able to get tile layers, and tile animations working correctly in my export process. I might use layers to behave as my colliding and non-colliding areas, but it would still be good to be able to specify which tiles are deadly so that I can place hazards in the tile editor.
« Last Edit: February 03, 2011, 12:39:33 am by dock »

Offline ptoing

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Re: Cosmigo Pro Motion tips?

Reply #13 on: February 02, 2011, 10:41:27 am
About destroying a brush with halfing, you can always restore your brush with Shift+B ;)
There are no ugly colours, only ugly combinations of colours.

Offline dock

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Re: Cosmigo Pro Motion tips?

Reply #14 on: February 03, 2011, 12:45:38 am
Ah, thanks ptoing!

Tilemaps are driving me absolutely crazy. I want to be able to arrange my tiles myself, basically, and that really isn't happening. I've tried importing tiles and mapping them but it either breaks entirely, or maps the colours weirdly, or doubles up the number of tiles and generally goes berserk. >_< The process I'm using has a tile index threshold for collidable tiles (all tiles above X number are collidable etc), but right now it's a massive pain to move them around.  It's starting to seem impractical to deal with a large number of tiles in Pro Motion because of these troubles, only really convenient to adjust each tile with a handful.

Is there anything I ought to watch out for when working with tilemaps, other than disabling sync?

Offline dock

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Re: Cosmigo Pro Motion tips?

Reply #15 on: February 03, 2011, 09:22:32 am
Does Pro Motion have any support for padded tilemaps either? A lot of engines require you to pad your tiles with a couple of pixels at the side, and right now I can't do that with Pro Motion.

Offline ptoing

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Re: Cosmigo Pro Motion tips?

Reply #16 on: February 03, 2011, 12:11:03 pm
If you make an image that has the tiles in the first rows then it will take them in that order. So you can arrange them there before converting the whole thing to a tilemap.

About the padding it is not supported, but it would not be hard to add the padding afterwards in the tilesheet, no?
There are no ugly colours, only ugly combinations of colours.

Offline dock

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Re: Cosmigo Pro Motion tips?

Reply #17 on: February 03, 2011, 02:28:31 pm
Aha, putting the tiles at the top of the image is an excellent tip! Thanks so much!! I can also put them in a box shape in the top left corner so long as I don't introduce new tiles.  It's making it much easier for me to spot and deal with accidentally duplicated tiles too. I'm working with very low res and low colour at the moment, so that can happen.

I can't seem to delete a tilemap once I create it.  To get around this I'm saving as PNG, closing image, and loading the image again. Is there another way of deleting a tilemap from a PMP project, in order to create the tilemap again?

As for tile padding, it only takes a few minutes, but it's the sort of task that I wouldn't want to have to do every time when I'm iterating or fixing. I'll see whether I can write a Photoshop action to do it.

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Re: Cosmigo Pro Motion tips?

Reply #18 on: February 03, 2011, 03:49:39 pm
You can not untilemap a tilemap project, as it is the format of the project. You can optimise the tilemap, which gets rid of non existent tiles and such. But what you always can do esp if you only have 1 layer is got Ctrl+A (which grabs the whole frame) Ctrl+N which opens the new project window and then just click from brush. And then generate a tilemap again. Takes a few seconds but it's not too bad..
There are no ugly colours, only ugly combinations of colours.

Offline AnnIshman

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Re: Cosmigo Pro Motion tips?

Reply #19 on: February 06, 2011, 11:24:21 pm
Did some more cleaning. The tricky part here is the point of this is to make it easier to track down the more obscure shortcuts that are not used often enough to commit to memory. If you leave the criteria as simple as that then the list is so long it nearly defeats the purpose. I think a reasonable goal is a beginner's list that when printed takes no more than a legal sized sheet of paper and an advanced list that trims the fat. The final size of the advanced list I am still debating. I was hoping small enough to tape to a monitor. I don't know if that will be possible.

First on the chopping block for the advanced list, imo, are the tools and brush shortcuts or at least the bulk of them. If you have not hit comma 5,000 times then you have not leveled up enough for the advanced list.