Well, you wanted feedback so here goes your feedback. From the semi-OG NPC editor developer.
Weird things
1. Two messages telling me you can't find my NPC directory are just unecessary.
2.
What on earth was that godawful "let's go" noise. okay thank god you let us disable that
3. Label18

4. What is the npc directory? Is is the directory with the npc graphics? You're better off to ask for the SMBX directory and assume the location from there.
5. .NET has a weird default sorting function where it goes 1, 10, 100, 101, etc. I have to find the code, but somewhere I have an alternate sorter that actually does proper numeric ordering (1, 2, 3, etc). But it's written in C#, you should be able to adapt it though.
6. When you're iterating through the npc files, just do a simple if statement to check if it has an m in the filename. If it does, don't add it. Having npc 100 and 100m in the list is unecessary.
Code: Select all
For Each fileName As String In fileList
If Not fileName.Contains("m") Then
listBox1.Add(fileName)
End If
Next
Something like that
7. You really shouldn't add uncessary tags. The only reason mine has a name tag is because PGE uses it, and it's written as a key. Granted, SMBX ignores it. But you should probably remove the "From which Mario Title" option and change NPC Name to output "name=<name>" in the file/preview.
8. Some values are unecessarily outputted. For example, I wrote a simple npc-100 replacement for shits and giggles.
I changed the following.
- -Grabside
-Grabtop
-Width
-Height
-Gfxwidth/gfxheight
-Framestyle
I had much more than that in my file, some of these could actually tamper with defaults that someone wanted to keep well,
default. This is why in mine and Wohlstand's editors, we have checkboxes next to the values we actually want to write. Here's a comparison between the two. Left side is from yours, right side from mine.
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http://i.imgur.com/ZnCxq9R.png[/rimg]
What I liked.
1. Scrolling UI. You got it to work right.
2. Animated icon, it's cute. I oughta try it.
3. Aside from the wario intro sound, your sounds are very tasteful and well thought out. I liked that changing the "how many frames" made a switch toggle sound and that adjusting the score made the sounds as if you kicked the enemy.
Potential Improvements.
1. I have code written somewhere that combines the mask and regular sprite and turns it into a single transparent sprite. I could adapt that into a library that would work in VB if you really wanted to.
2. Also, you could animate simply with timers and image croppping if you wanted to.
3. Why can't I open external files?????
Conclusion
I must say, this isn't as bad as I thought it would be. It has charm, but it just doesn't make sense in a world where we have two other full functioning (and functioning well) NPC editors.
Oh, and I checked out your website for shits and giggles.
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http://i.imgur.com/xnILKTW.png[/rimg]
Your gaming and production class computers can barely be called those. I know you're not doing it right now, but AMD CPU's really aren't the greatest at least for the production class, god especially the 6 cores. You know it's not 6 true cores right? It's more like 3 physical 3 logical. Trust me here. Not to say they're bad but there's better choices.