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The bugs:

  1. The pink status bar in the sprite editor is a pixel smaller in "full screen" (tab button) mode. You can also see this if you press F6 to take a screenshot in that mode, which will briefly make the status bar a pixel bigger again just to alert you of the saved screenshot. Maybe the editing area could be pushed up a pixel and a gray line added above the status bar so it matches the layout of the map editor.
  2. For some reason, on new projects SFX 00 has SPD set to 01 but all the other SFX have SPD set to 16. Not sure if this a bug or intentional, but it's still a strange but annoying inconsistency.
  3. In graph mode on the SFX editor, you can't choose a C note in octave 0, as the lowest it lets you click is C# in octave 0.
  4. In tracker mode, only the C note in octave 5 can be accessed without manually changing the octave number. 9, O, and 0 could be mapped to C#, D, and D# (respectively) in the higher octave. An E note should also be added to octave 5 and the E note of the higher octave should then be mapped to P to make the keyboard mappings feel more complete. Besides, it'd feel strange just having the right-most mapped key on the top rows of keys being mapped to a sharp note.

And now, some suggestions (and nitpics):

  1. Is there any reason for the weird shadow effect on the top of the map editor...? As far as I could tell, that effect doesn't even appear anywhere else.
  2. In the SFX editor, is there any reason the view mode seems to be set per SFX?
  3. I think there should be a function to change a note's instrument / effect / volume on the tracker view by clicking the active setting (i.e. if octave 2 is currently selected and you click octave 2, it acts as if you typed 2 into the current note's octave column).
  4. For the SFX editor, I think a clickable piano overlay should be added to the tracker view and effects should be added to the graph view. Here's my vision for the what they would look like... (btw, the same sfx data is shown in both designs)
    Graph view idea: http://i.imgur.com/QLSRdpa.png
    In this design, I removed a pixel of spacing below the PITCH label (but now it matches the spacing below the VOLUME label); I added a pixel of spacing above the VOLUME label to make the effect buttons fit correctly; and I made the graph two pixels taller, one pixel for the potential E note in octave 5 (see bug #4 above) and one simply to fill in the rest of the available space (but hey, the C note in octave 0 actually has a tail now).
    The volume graph still has the blocks color-coded based on the volume, but now they have dark gray bands coming from them, with the bottom band being color-coded based on the effect chosen. The effects color-coding uses the same colors as the instruments. The gray bands are mostly there so you can easily see which bands correspond to which notes, but they're also a nice little bit of decoration.
    Tracker view idea: http://i.imgur.com/gV1yIPo.png
    I moved the volume and effect controls below the tracker so they line up with the position of the effect controls on the graph view idea, but otherwise the piano was all I really did on this one. You could probably use the space on the bottom right for something else like, for example: A reference as to what each column is or a mini tracker view, but you could just leave that area empty.

Funny enough, after typing all this, I realized that I opened PICO-8 several hours ago to actually program and got distracted while trying to think of music for my game. Oh well.

P#22625 2016-06-10 17:20 ( Edited 2016-06-10 22:26)

Great analysis and suggestions

P#22633 2016-06-10 18:26 ( Edited 2016-06-10 22:26)

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