If you play experimentals, you may have noticed that some items now have ASCII art shown below their description. It looks pretty cool so I decided to make some myself, but found out that putting it into the game was rather tedious at times because you have to define every color change. So if you draw an image that looks like this
If you want to do it manually, it’ll take a lot of time and you’ll probably make some mistakes. Fortunately REXPaint, a tool for making ASCII art, received an update which allows you to export your pictures to format which is ready to paste into json file - I actually generated the text file above using REXPaint. Aside from that, REXPaint has many other useful functions, like drawing ellipses, lines, and other things. It also lets you use the font and palette used in the game, so you can see exactly how the picture will look in the game. Here is a guide to installing everything. If you think something is not working correctly or needs an improvement, here is a topic on Grid Sage Forums where you can discuss it with the developer.
You mean making mapgen jsons? I guess it would be pretty convenient, at least more than a text editor. You could do stuff like walls or floor really quickly with rectangles or lines, or use colors to highlight something. You can also import text files to edit an existing map. There are square fonts too so proportions won’t be off.
The main advantage I see with it is being able to free-draw with a mouse, flood fill, and draw polygons. Layers are also huge; in fact, depending on how it handles layers it may be worth adjusting how our mapgen works to read layers as defined by rexpaint. It’s something I’ll have to look into.
There’s no support for different ASCII art depending on attachments in the game. I’m not a coder so I don’t know if it’d be possible but right now we don’t even have ASCII art for guns.
