The challenge with the Outrun sprite is that it has multiple colors, but many islands of only a few pixels, so it requires multiple jump-stitches, or so I thought so.
To prevent the jump-stitches I decided to connect the different “islands” with a run-stitch. I modified my Pixem editor to do that, and I embroidered the t-shirt.
The run-stitch path is “smart”, in the sense that it will take shortest-path, but the weight is measured by color difference. This will prevent a black stitch running over a white if there is an alternative path going over brown.
The problems with my new “smart” algorithm, are:
- I cannot edit that the algorithm generates. I have to add support to edit the generated run-stitches.
- Connecting blocks of same colors with run-stitches is not optimized. On certain images it can cause going over the same run-stitch over and over, creating a “big” path.
Unfortunately I learned about the “connecting blocks” bug while I was embroidering Outrun.