I'd just like to inform you that this tool has been invaluable in helping me port Stunt Car Racer to the Plus/4, so thanks for creating it!
After using the tool for a while, here are some of the pain points I ran into:
- I really could have used global keys for various cursor actions: moving around in the character set/map view, changing current chroma/luma etc. without having to click in the respective window. Being able to keep the mouse in the character editor and drive everything else from the keyboard would make life much easier.
- Global color replace (i.e. specific source to destination colour), also limited to selected chars, would have saved quite a bit of manual work too.
- Ability to offset bitmap horizontally when importing (to find better fits for the character boundaries). Maybe even having an automatic "minimum error" mode that just cycles through all 32/64 possibilities for sub-char positions could be interesting.
- I found that the luma values were somewhat off. Luma levels 0 to 3 shouldn't brighten so quickly, because there's supposed to be a bigger jump between 3 and 4. Especially 2 and 3 look overly bright compared to both emulated and real machines. In the help you wrote that you're using the Yape palette, but this doesn't look like it to me. I'd look into taking the Multipaint palette into use, or even the one used by Vice (all three programs seem to be in close agreement about the luma levels).
- For the C16 and Plus/4 it would make sense to have an importer for the Multi Botticcelli format, since it seems to be the standard used by the community.
Note that I was basically using it as a bitmap editor to translate the original C64 graphics (and partly the Amiga one as well), and it's possible that I should have used Multipaint instead for some of that work. However, CharPad has a much better importer, and it also has much better export options, so I think it was the better choice overall.
This is all food for thought, not really feature requests, since it all depends on the direction you want to take with the editor. The only clear issue from the above is the mismatch in luma levels from all the other tools, I think you should review that more carefully.
Thanks again for the excellent tool!