A bit late to the party, glad to see the forums live!
So I hope this is the official post advertising Aloevera! Marketing spiel follows:
Aloevera is a command-line tool that facilitates the development of graphical assets for use with the Commander X16.
In a nutshell, Aloevera transforms images created with modern editors into formats that can be directly imported into your X16 development project. It aims to be a simple, easily integrated tool that:
Outputs resources in a variety of formats ready to include or import into your X16 project, including:
CA65-Compatible Assembly Statements (Which should also work in any assembler that supports a .BYTE statement)
CC65 Header files
BASIC DATA Statements
.BIN Files (for use with the VLOAD Command)
Assists your resource creation pipeline by validating your input data and ensuring that your source images match the format expected by your target VERA layer mode.
Provides helpful information to help you fix problems when your image data cannot be translated into the format expected by VERA
Gives you complete control of how and where assets are exported, allowing you to build a shippable 'Release' image
Integrates into your preferred build system or development process as a simple command-line tool with minimal overhead.
Supports all VERA modes and types, including:
Text
Tilesets
Tilemaps
Sprites
Bitmaps
There's also a usage guide that I hope serves as a half-decent introduction to VERA coding:
https://github.com/yeastplume/aloevera/tree/master/docs
Thanks everyone! I hope Aloevera can become the go-to tool for X16 projects. And if you're at all interested, I'm always looking for people to help with the effort. PRs very welcome!