Suggestions and enhancement for offset tool

CandyFace

Soo... this might be a little embarrassing, but after all this time i have been working with PyxelEdit, i first discovered the offset tool about a week ago. This means that i have been using selection tool, and cmd+move to move my sprites around. The offset tool works really well and I love the details about how many pixels you have moved right beside your cursor, this could have saved me a lot of time, so why haven't i used this tool before? 

When i think about it, offset sounds logical, and straight forward, but unnecessarily technical. Its use has mostly been in typography, engineering, architecture etc... Never have i seen the word been used in context with image positioning, thus I believe that renaming to something simpler would equal in a better user experience.

My first suggestion would be having it renamed to "move tool", as the term is better known among artists and is often used in image editing applications.

My second suggestion would be to simplify the icon or change it to something like this:

Now moving onto my enhancement:

I noticed that when you use the offset tool, you move the entire graphic which is inside that specific tile. By using an algorithm such as grassfire, which by checking if a pixel is connected to its surroundings or not, you should be able to quickly detect and only move a specific part of the graphic within a tile. You could still make a shortcut such as "hold shift to move everything" to make it work on the entire tile which it currently does. The functionality would more or less be the same, therefore it should not require you to create a new tool.

The goal of these suggestions and the enhancement should be a more efficient workflow, and a easier readable interface. 

I hope you will take some of the things i've said into your consideration. PyxelEdit is my favorable pixel graphics software, and i only wish for it to become even more awesome

Thanks for reading.

Danik

Thanks for the suggestion. I'm not sure about only moving part of the tile, because I think it's more common to offset the whole tile.

Moving a whole connected piece is a really interesting idea though! I think this would be a really useful new tool. I imagine you would just click and drag somewhere in the layer, and all connected pixels would be detached and moved along (the effect would be pretty much the same as if you selected the pixels and used Transform on them, only a lot quicker).

CandyFace

Exactly, as long as you click where there are pixels placed, it should do a detection and you should be able to move that part separately from the rest of the graphic in the layer.

this image below shows a 4-way and a 8-way connectivity. As you can see, the two pieces, becomes separated in the first example: This is the 4-way connectivity. it only checks whether the pixels are connected from 4 directions, up, down, left, right. The 8-ways connectivity takes from all 8 directions and thus concludes that the two blobs are one. Had there been a space in-between the pieces, then there would be two blobs again.