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Uxn - Learning Tools

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Date: 2023-01-09
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Before I start working at the real project of writing a text editor in uxn, I'm going to first try and make sure I understand how some of the screen and sprite stuff work. I sort of get it but I'm also just guessing. I don't intuitively understand hex and binary enough.

Hex to Binary

The first tool I want to write is one that will show me a hex value and it broken up into the bit pattern. I think this would be helpful to visually see what things look like.

https://nivethan.dev/toys/uxn-tools/hex-to-binary.html

I realized that a nibble is half a byte. Hilarious.

System Color Viewer

The second tool is to see how the system colors work. The idea that you assign all your reds, then all your blues and then all your greens is a bit weird. It makes sense but I think writing a tool to take the system colors and show me what exactly I'm playing with in the format I can understand it is valuable.

https://nivethan.dev/toys/uxn-tools/system-colors.html

This definitely helped to cement what the colors mean and how to go about writing in the colors.

#image https://i.imgur.com/ht7I2Sd.png

1bpp Sprite Editor

The third tool is to draw 1bpp sprites easily. This is something I just want to do. I think learning nasu might be better but I don't fully get how it works so I think writing my own would be a fun side project.

https://nivethan.dev/toys/uxn-tools/sprite-editor.html

This was useful and slowly learning how to make a font. I wonder if this is actually how one should go about it. 8x8 seems to be too big for the fonts and this doesn't deal with the spacing properly. The font looks messy and not something I'd actually use.

#image https://i.imgur.com/EFefzZR.png

2bpp Sprite Editor

The fourth tool is to do a 2bpp sprite editor. This is basically the same as the above and once again using the existing tools might be better but I don't have a firm enough grasp on them to use them.

At some point I will also recreate the Munro font and see if I can use it.