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icombo

Declarative Image Combination

Why?

I have been dabbling in board game design as a hobby with my family. The most toilsome part of the process for me is editing images for all the little icons. For example, let's say I need a set of icons to show that you can covert 2 logs into a board. I would need to open an image editor paste the various parts in there, make sure sizing is correct, etc. Then if I wanted to change the conversion to 3 logs into a board, I would have to open the image editor again. So I developed icombo to speed up this process and provide a declarative format (toml) that will handle joining the images, rotation and sizing to provide consistent results.

Now my workflow looks like this:

  • go to game-icons.net and find the parts for the image I want to create

  • drop them into my image_parts directory

  • add a few lines to my icombo.toml file

    [[images]]
name = "logs_to_boards"

    [[images.image_parts]]
    file_name = "log"
    count = 2

    # arrow faces up by default and rotates counter clockwise
    [[images.image_parts]]
    file_name = "arrow"
    rotation_degrees = 270

    [[images.image_parts]]
    file_name = "board"

  • run icombo to produce logs_to_boards.png

Why TOML?

While my personal preference would by yml, I think toml is easer for non coder types

Setup

  • Head over the the release page
  • Download the artifact suffixed with example_project for your OS
  • Extract the compressed file and run icombo
  • Just the binaries are also available if you don't want an example project

Usage

  • add the images you wish to combine to your image_input_directory in the example this is ./image_parts
  • add your image definition to the icombo.toml file 
    [[images]]
# this image will be output to the image_output_directory as my_new_image.png
name = "logs_to_boards"

    # image parts are read from top to bottom bulding the image from left to right
    [[images.image_parts]]

    # icombo will serach for log.png in the configured image_input_directory
    file_name = "log"

    # icombo will repeat the image based on count, if count is 1 you can remove this line
    count = 2

    # arrow faces up by default and rotates counter clockwise
    [[images.image_parts]]

    file_name = "arrow"
    
    # icombo will rotate the image based on rotation_degrees counter clockwise
    rotation_degrees = 270

    # simplest way to define a part, will add it once not changing rotation
    [[images.image_parts]]
    file_name = "board"
  • save your file and run icombo then check your image_output_directory
  • you can also define the following configurations in the icombo.toml file 
    [options]
# where icombo will look for the parts to build images
image_input_directory = "./image_parts"

# where icombo will output images
image_output_directory = "./output_images"

# the pixel size of a side of an image part
# this configuration will make each image part a square whose sides are 64 pixels
# if my image had 4 parts, the height would be 64 pixels and the width 256 pixels (4 * 64)
image_part_size_pixels = 64

# number of images that can be built simultaneously, if left at zero icombo will attempt to build all images simultaneously 
concurrency = 0

Limitations

  • only handles .png files
  • only builds images horizontally from left to right
  • cannot configure individual images with size
  • no support for setting background color
  • transparency untested

Possible Improvments

  • address limitations above
  • instead of reading each image part from disk everytime, store them in memory
    • this may or may not be helpful, need to test, possibly trading memory for speed
  • add flags for config file path, now it must be at ./icombo.toml
  • add functionality for handling other config formats (yml, json, etc)

Credits