Best way to design DPC+ playfields?

[RiverRaider73]

The visual bB playfield designer worked great for standard kernel games, but I've been playing with DPC+ and it's a lot more difficult to use as the playfield sizes are much larger and the entire image won't fit on the screen while designing. Does anyone have any tips, tricks or experience for doing this? Or is the best plan to just type out periods and X's? Sorry, I'm a complete noob! Thanks for the help!

[+Tyler Frisbee]

Well, there may be a better way than this, but here's how I do it. First I just type out a field of the "periods" (88 x 32 or something like that?) into a text box in Photoshop and change the font to something monospace like Courier. Then I stretch the text box horizontally so it's the same dimensions as what the game should probably be.

Now everything fits the screen and when I start to replace "periods" with "X's" I should easily be able to see what's going on; the dimensions of each "X" is similar to the dimension of each pixel. I think your main issue is that the built-in editor is tall and skinny as opposed to short and wide...if that makes any sense. I'm sure there's a 'normal' way of doing it, but this is how I pull it off. Anyway, I don't know if this is what you meant, but I hope this helps!

 

[Papa]

I just tell the editor in VBB to be the size of the background I'm going to make. When you get into large backgrounds it can be odd. Things get really skinny and then appear wide when on screen. When starting with Street Fight World I used massive backgrounds which ate up room so there was nothing left for characters. After scaling things down I was happy with twenty-two row screens.

[Mountain King]

I use Excel. This allows me to set the "resolution" and then I import a picture. Then I fill in the areas I want and then I can export to a text file.

[RiverRaider73]

Thanks for all the great replies guys! It was aggravating that the built in editor wasn't really "what you see is what you get." The photoshop idea is pretty creative, but I don't have that right now so excited to give excel a shot! This will hopefully prevent some headaches.... thanks everyone!

[ultima]

I use paint.net open a new picture set the resolution. Turn on the grid. Then take a screen capture and open the picture then adjust the photo to atari aspect.

[Mountain King]

Thanks for all the great replies guys! It was aggravating that the built in editor wasn't really "what you see is what you get." The photoshop idea is pretty creative, but I don't have that right now so excited to give excel a shot! This will hopefully prevent some headaches.... thanks everyone!

You may need to adjust your Picture ahead of time to fit the screen in Excel. Excel will want to tile the image if its too small.

After you set up your gridlines, Import your photo as the background. Use "." and "x" as your markers as you "trace" your background.

When you are done. Set your Column widths to 1 and save as a text file.

You should be able to copy and paste the text right into your code.

Good Luck!

Edited August 7, 2016 by Mountain King