Tiler - A tiny tool to make transparent-cell PNG sprites for TorqueX/TXB

Recently i played along TorqueX/TXB with some pre-rendered
walking man sprites, and found some difficulties to make
sprite PNG resources with transparent-bordered cells.

It was hard to align to cell boundaries with transparent borders
in Photoshop or other image manupulation tools.
(They don't recognize the cell layer's transparent border)
And i saw some tutorial movies at TDN, IMHO, it's not good to
buy/install Macromedia Fireworks for proper tranparent cell images :-(

Well, i decided to make a tiny tool for this, with 3 or 4-time silly efforts to
invent the wheel in the air, i managed to make this works :
(How silly, the simplest way was the best way for transparent PNG...)


Download Tiler(20080728) (with source)
(I doubt this link from MS SkyDrive works well, please let me know if there's any problem to download
Anybody who needs only executables, please use that in bin/Release folder.)



Usage:

1. Click the 'Load PNG Files...' button. (A file selection dialog appeared)

2. In a selection dialog, select some 32bit transparent PNG images you need.

3. If the selection were wrong, click 'Clean List' button and reselect.
(sorry for inconvenience, i always click a item at the bottom first, and shift-click
the first item last, thus there's no need for me to adjust file orders now.
if there's anyone got problem with this, just tell me and i'll adjust it for you.)

4. If you need, Edit horiz. or vert. cell count as you wish.
(it'll expands automatically and insert blank cells for matching cell matrix.
the images you selected will be saved in left-to-right, top-to-down order.)

5. Click 'Save tiled file to PNG' button, and give a new name to save.
Check your result image if it's well aligned.

6. In your TXB, just add the saved PNG for a new material,
set the cell count as you made earlier.

It's too small to help, but i guess there's someone who needs it badly like me ;-)



Future Improvement :

Well, I got some plans to improve this soon.
(though it'll not be soon enough, maybe more requests will make it sooner)

It'll get new features like :
- Animation Play Preview (with playtime changing like TXB itself)
- Some editing capabilities
: cell add/delete/drag & drop reordering
(that's why i pend the reordering feature - without preview it's minor to me.)
: boundary clipping for each cell (maybe some needs to save/load these settings, too)
: actual cell boundary extraction/averaging/applying (for making a smallest result cell blocks)
Ok, that's all for now.



If there's any good ideas, suggestions or requests, please feel free to tell me.