Excellent Idea! My brother had the same point so because I use a 2 colour drawing system One colour on left one on right. I did it so that pressing a hot key does the same thing. No as quick I know but nearly. I was thinking of the space bar since it is so large and would be easy to hit quick.

Thanks for the idea though

Yep there is a preview window. You build animations by having the sprite sheet open in front of you then clicking the cells. While you do this it shows what the current animation looks like. Also in the preview animation window you can slow down or speed up the animation so if you see one part of your animation that doesn't look right you can see precisely which frame is the offending one.

I feel like I'm on the right track to a sweet piece of software

Hey all. New to this forum. Someone sent me over from gamedev and said you chaps might have some more info for me. I apologize if this runs a tad long.

Basically I am a programmer with no art skills. I have a brother with great art skills. We are combining our powers to make an application that focuses on sprite sheets for 2D games.

I'm just about ready to release it to the public as sort of a alpha testing phase as it is fully functional but a bit buggy at the moment.

I've looked at some other sprite sheet tools and I think there is room for my program in this world and it won't be redundant. Graphics gale is probably the closest to my program I have found.

Here is a quick run down of what I think are the major features of my app

-Layers: Like in photoshop and such you can separate elements of the sprite into layers making it easier to make changes to certain elements. Like drawing a basic animated form and clothing layers on top to make it easier to change the clothing later. Layers can have their opacity changed.

-Animating: Once a sprite is completed you can proceed to build animations by clicking on the cells. (ie: walking cells 0-7 at 60ms a cell) a preview is shown of the animation and you also set what the animation does when it completes like looping, freezing, going to a different animation etc. What makes this a neat feature is that when you export the final sprite sheet an animation ".sas" file is spit out (really just XML). That can be used by a programmer to know what the artist had intended each animation to be and once the code is written can simply use the .sas file to load that animation info into a game.

-Hue Saturation Brigtness shifting: Idea behind this feature is often times people will want to have very similar sprites with only a small colour change. Think like megaman or npc's in rpg's. This feature allows you to narrow down your colour selection and change the HSB (hue, saturation, brightness). This was done so you can do something like take a yellow piece of armor with red lines and turn it into a black piece of armor with green lines. The whole process would take about a minute or two while if you tried to do it using colour replace it could take a lot longer and might not look as good.

-Tools: The usual painting pencil line drawing etc. It has a few tools I am quite proud of those being, colour replace: Click a colour and it will change every occurrence of that colour to your selected colour. Also an outline tool which will allow you to instantly outline an area with a specified colour.

-Grid: Sections off the sprite sheet into where the cell boundaries are and can be further broken down to half and quarter cell boundaries. Finally it can display all of this and at higher magnification a grid of the pixels

Here is a picture of a recent build of the project
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_GpfGx4I2Tpo/Siv00WPM9JI/AAAAAAAAADA/nWKyYs_O3o0/s1600-h/SSS.png


I know nothing in this program is new or revolutionary but as far as I know there isn't a program that combines sprite sheet making with some effects like layers and hue shifting.

So with this information I want to asks artists out there a few things.

1) Do you guys see a point in me attempting to get this program in wide use or is the market already saturated. It doesn't matter to me to much as I have my own plans for use with my brother...

2) What are some things you guys wish sprite editing software had now? My brother was my main source for features as he has used a few programs but I would love to hear from other artists to build a program that can meet a wide base of needs

It's not ready yet but I expect it to be done within 2-3 weeks so I will let you know more about download details then. Thanks a lot for any information you can give me and please don't spare my feelings