Spritesheet Analyzer

[torridgristle]

Bug Report: I had Spritesheet Analyzer open in the background while typing this post and noticed my laptop was getting hot. Checked the task manager and Java (confirmed to be running this program) was constantly using all of a CPU core. Its usage appeared to scale with the window size such that the maximized window used 25% CPU / 100% of a core, and resizing it to be smaller dropped it to a steady 14% or so. I reckon it's constantly redrawing even though it was a static image and nothing was being analyzed.

This has been very helpful for finding goof-ups with palettes, more so than most programs. Usually it's been a tedious hassle with the magic wand tool to see if anything doesn't get selected and thus doesn't match the target value.

Feature Suggestions for Organization + Cleaning

The ability to merge palettes would be helpful for this situation: I have a sheet of NES sprites, some sprites are using the same 4-color palette in-game but some of the sprites in the sheet use white and some don't. Currently it creates two palettes for this (which is probably the best way to handle it on its own) but I'd like to combine the Black + Pink + White palette with the Black + Pink palette so that they're both selected and manipulated and merged with less duplicated data in the list. I can see a problem with this though, if there's a situation where there are sprites that have the same palette save for 1 entry, and there are sprites that should be using those different palettes but don't use the one differing color and thus end up with their own shorter palette missing that last entry, they could end up merged into an unintended palette grouping. Perhaps a rectangular or freehand selection tool to choose what sprites gets merged into what palettes would be helpful.

Continuing from the selection solution for palette grouping, this could be helpful for grouping sprites into named groups, like Firing Animation and Left-Facing Equipment Variations, for human organization and for possible future features to use and have available.

The option to hide the reference section of the window so that it doesn't take up space when it isn't wanted, even if there's a reference loaded, would be nice.

With later versions and new features loose parts of sprites may be a problem so the ability to merge sprites into a single sprite, like if there's a floating piece that should be in the same sprite, may be good to add.

Since there's a grid, and it seems to understand the bounds of sprites, it seems like a natural continuation to have an auto-arrange function. Knowing what should go where would be a problem, but using a combination of named groups and rectangular marquees there may be a natural solution. It could arrange things with name-grouped sprites in the same area; maybe detect 8x8 tile boundaries in the sprites by comparing pieces of sprites to find repeated tiles which could help with arranging items on a grid if some sprite boundaries don't fill out a multiple of 8 pixels in a direction, this way tiles are locked to the grid rather than a few boundary edges locked to the grid, but sometimes that may not be worth bothering with if it's a computational grind so I'd take it or leave it, it just seems like it'd be neat to have and be satisfying to see happen; perhaps manually drag multiple sprites via selection into general areas and have Spritesheet Analyzer cluster and arrange them together with a specified distance of padding between each sprite boundary or detected 8x8 tile.