Agh ! It's ... well, maybe hideous is saying too much. In any case it certainly doesn't belong there.

Here is a screenshot of the mapper. I was experimenting with a box for a set of rooms that are 3x3 8x8 sprites in size.

No problem here.

But now watch what happens when I scroll up by one tile.

The dot appears ! I know this dot is used to denote that a tile you chose in the mapper may be black but is not the first tile #0.

In this case it most certainly is tile #0 so it should not be appearing, @zep. And it only appears in this instance.

So for it to appear depending upon which part of the map you are viewing is incorrect and definitely an error.

I.. uh... I don't see a dot in either of the images. Could you point it out in the image. Or is this the #misinformation dot?

Hi @caranha.

It's a tiny little dot but it's there. Here, let me focus it.

As mentioned this was added to the map editor to let you know of a tile from the spritesheet that had no pixels in it and was greater than #0. In this case it =IS= sprite #0 so it's definitely an error for it to appear here and not at a different focal point.

Curious and yes I could easily replicate the issue:

It's not your center empty #0 tile putting the dot, it's the tile below that has empty space in the top half of your tile.
As far as I can tell, it mistakenly puts the dark blue dot at the origin of a tile that is empty in the top half and the only pixels are out of the map viewport thus it's convinced it's an empty tile and mistakenly marks it with the dot.

(more info behind the picture: I just painted pixels at the bottom of tile #1 leaving the upper part black/empty. In the Map editor I drew 5 tiles horizontally with spr tile#1 and scrolled up to hide the bottom half just outside the map viewport)

@dw817 or could it be... a feature? 🤔 The dot could be there to warn you that -even if it looks an empty tile from the current viewpoint- it has actually pixels below, to avoid maybe overwriting them?

yes this happens for all sprites if it's drawn part is off screen or just empty it'll place a dot to let you know that it's not empty. It's really nice

Hi @SmellyFishstiks.

So the dot appears directly on top of a tile and only if the tile beneath it which cannot be seen is tile #0 - and this is expected behavior. Yeah that's a bit much.

Here now, can you please post me an example of - how that is useful ? I'm just not understanding how it is ...

Now the other idea though in having a dot on any map tile that has a sprite which has all black pixels though and is not tile #0 though, that makes good sense to me.

I did that quite some time back when I was working on EVE, a very busy map and game editor I wrote in Blitz.

You had multiple modes. Onion skin to overlay multiple mapper areas. View not zero. Which would highlight any tile used in the mapper that had all black pixels and was not tile #0.

And info entire which would place a 3-digit Sprite # directly on top of every sprite being used in the mapper, yet leave sprite #0 without digits still showing 3-digits for all others, colors based upon their flags such as solidity, slope, and definition.

. . .

Anyways ... I'm gonna want ZEP to rule on this as that information about the dot appearing based upon a tile beside it (not counting itself) is not listed in the Pico-8 help manual.

@dw817
> So the dot appears directly on top of a tile and only if the tile beneath it which cannot be seen is tile #0 - and this is expected behavior. Yeah that's a bit much.

Hmm no, not the tile beneath and not #0. I hoped my image/snip could have clarified it, I'll try putting that in words but not being native English.. not my forte (so adding more images as well).

So you know that in the usual/default view of Map editor layout at 100% zoom, in the viewport above 8.5 tiles are displayed in height, so the one at the bottom is always partially displayed, top half, you can only see the top 4 pixels of it. I pressed spacebar to display the 2x2 grid, see that small strip of 4 pixels below:

Now, in this example tileset I have tile#1 that has no pixels in the top half; I've used tile#1 twice in the map, sort of steps.
As soon as I scroll/pan up, in the strip of 4px below I can still see the top half of the filled blocks but I can't see any pixel of my tile#1. So Zep kindly warns us that it's not really an empty tile, there are pixels below and does this by putting a darkblue pixel at top-left of that tile.

So it definitely looks like a feature, very subtle and hard to explain or be appreciated (especially if one constantly keeps the screen brightness low, like me) but an useful feature.
Hope this helped.