Hacker News Reader

Comment by MomsAVoxell | Hacker News Reader

Very nice product!

In the retro computing world, the use of "ASCII" to construct levels and worlds is quite prevalent.

I immediately considered whether Monodraw might be used as a kind of level editor in that context.

Would you consider adding an '8-bit character bitmap' mode, which allows for the bitmap to also be edited?

With such a feature, Monodraw would become immediately applicable to those of us building retro games for older platforms where this technique is used rather extensively to produce compelling art-work.

For context, here is an example game which uses plain ol' ASCII chars to deliver some fun Moon Buggy action:

https://www.oric.org/software/ascii_moon_buggy-2500.html

The same technique is used here, albeit with redefined character sets, to implement a Scuba Dive adventure:

https://www.oric.org/software/scuba_dive-89.html

View on HN

Thank you for the kind words!

> Would you consider adding an '8-bit character bitmap' mode, which allows for the bitmap to also be edited?

Can you clarify with an example? Monodraw supports "surfaces" which are just like bitmaps - you can use the Pencil tool and draw on those surfaces with any characters you want (there's a palette in the inspector), just like a bitmap editor.

I guess we might be describing the same thing, and I am yet to have time to download and play with Monodraw (IT policies), but if there is indeed a way that surfaces could be replaced at a pixel level, so that for example the 'A' character becomes a Pacman, then we'd be aligned.

The only issue is, are these surfaces 8x8 or similar, and would it be possible to load in a 6x8 bitmap, for those unusual 8-bit computers of the era which used them .. I refer to my favourite system of the period, the Oric Atmos, which graphics techniques are described here: https://osdk.org/index.php?page=articles&ref=ART9

(EDIT: details on the charset feature, which would be 'nice to have' in Monodraw, here: https://osdk.org/index.php?page=articles&ref=ART9#title11)

IF I can edit the bitmap and render as 6x8 characters, Monodraw would be immediately useful for level design. In any case, when I have access to a non-work computer, I hope to spend some time digging in and informing myself, so apologies if none of this is relevant ..

I wonder if REXPaint might be more what you are looking for, though it could stumble upon the OS requirements. It needs Wine to run under OSX.

There are plenty of tools which can be used to do these kinds of projects, I'm more intrigued by the nice interface of Monodraw and whether it can be added to the repertoire ..

Not parent commenter, but I've been using rexpaint for a while but the editor is clunky and format too limited, I've been looking at other options - At a quick look monodraw does look interesting as a more fully featured replacement.

Adding more character sets besides ASCII and shape elements?

Having all the Unicode emoji galore as an option would be great. Not just for colorful code docs, but millions of social media content creators out there!

Brilliant app, nice work.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com