a complete rewrite and a new name to match!

as you'll know if you've ready any of my dev logs, I've attempted to rewrite image to bitsy numerous times in the last 2 years. well, between having a lot more free time this year and getting some more experience under my belt, I've finally pulled it off. I started off by making tilesy, which is another bitsy image tool, but much simpler - no resizing, no colour palettes, no dithering. using tilesy as a basis, I added all that functionality and polished it up a bit.

pixsy should be much easier to use - I avoided overwhelming the user with every UI element at once, in favour of a page system.

the performance is much better - you can now drag the brightness slider and get immediate feedback on the image results.

it's more robust; I have tested my new game data parser on a data set of over 1,500 bitsy games with almost universal success.

given that this is almost a complete rewrite, it seemed fitting to give it a new name, to match my other bitsy tools mixsy and tilesy. what do you think?

what's the catch?

two things:

1. pixsy requires a browser with WebAssembly support. it may not work in outdated/niche browsers. this includes the itch desktop downloadable version. apparently a fix is in the works and will hopefully be released soon.
2. the "reuse tiles" option has been removed for simplicity's sake. if you need that functionality, you could still use the old version. as far as I'm aware, people don't really use this feature. but if you miss it, let me know and I'll make it more of a priority!

what's next?

I hope to add more dithering algorithms - I have already implemented Floyd-Steinberg but I'd like to add Atkinson and Bayer 4×4. if you have a preference I'd be interested to hear about it.

other than that, I'm not quite sure what to add - I'd love to hear your feedback.

some ideas

• camera support (add a selfie to a bitsy?!)
• sprite painting, item painting (click on tiles to turn them into sprites/items)
• optional noise reduction (for each pixel surrounded by pixels of a different colour, make them the same colour as their neighbours - this will reduce tile counts)
• room seams (e.g. specify that all the rightmost tiles will be exits to the left side of a designated room)
• Bitsy HD support (this is fairly abandoned at the moment, but it's still possible to use)
• HTML support (import and export HTML instead of game data)
• multicolour rooms (I'm not a huge fan of this as it necessitates hacks and feels a little against the spirit of bitsy - and RGBitsy already exists)
• automatic "new palette" generation

as always, I'd love to see anything you make with pixsy, so send me your bitsies if you want!

happy bitsying,
max