I am posting a different kind of update today. I've been away from ZC for a while to work on school, but this project is far from dead. I've actually been working on something special:
What is this? This is a Java-based palette editor I'm writing to edit ZC palettes. So far I can load and save files, move colors around, rename level palettes, cut/copy/paste, as well as perform actions like hue shifts, lighten/darken, etc.. The main purpose of this application is to help make palettes by linking structured ramps -- that is, having colors that automatically update relative to other colors.
For instance, you should be able to say "use this kind of blue", and in the right structure, it will automatically generate the tints and shades of the color, as well as doing environmental hue-shifts to quickly make large numbers of nice palettes.
I've also made a neat method for generating colors from their names. In code this means you can type something like
Color c = Color.named("Royal Blue");
and you'll get the standard royal blue color. You can't yet do this in the GUI, but it should be no trouble to add a selector for common color names with little color patches next to them. As easy as this was to implement, I'm curious why it isn't a standard feature of most color editors. I have ~1100 different color names in my file. One could easily allow you to name your own colors or look them up in an online database instead. (But really, that would just be feature creep at this point. There are more important things to do first.)
The reverse problem is a little more challenging: take a given color and find the nearest color that has a name. Probably needs a BK-Tree or something. It's also fairly confusing to come up with a clear notion of the 'nearness' of two colors.
So no new fancy shots from ZC this time. Winterim starts on Monday, then my toughest semester yet starts after that. So I can't even promise to make any progress on this for a while.
Edited by RetraRoyale, 04 January 2015 - 01:10 AM.
