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[zed-ex]

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

[JaJitsu]

One thing i think is great for making pixel art with graphics gale is when you right click you obtain the color you are over.

It makes things a lot quicker

[Bree]

This sounds like a pretty cool project. One thing I know I need is the ability to preview GIFs quickly- I'm doing a lot of animation work, so I need to make sure that the movements look good.

[zed-ex]

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

[JaJitsu]

I use ctrl z to undo a lot so having the spacebar pick up the color would be easy for me.
good idea.

[Loren Schmidt]

I would be very interested in testing this out and giving some feedback. It seems very promising, and I would be only too happy to use GIMP / Photoshop less.

[Gnarf]

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.

I prefer Ctrl, because that's what I'm used to (Pro Motion). And I like it if it's like Ctrl+mouseclick picks a color for the button you clicked.


Zooming in/out with the mouse wheel is also pretty essential to me. I'd also like it if I could hold a hotkey (say, Alt) in order to use the mouse to drag the view around (i.e. while holding Alt, the mouse works quite like the Hand Tool in Adobe Reader).

[Gainsworthy]

Hey, this sounds pretty sweet. I'd like to see how it turns out - I'm still on MSPaint, after all. I'm no Artiste, but I dabble when I'm spriting. Layers and a built in animator would make my day, though.

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.

I prefer Ctrl, because that's what I'm used to (Pro Motion). And I like it if it's like CTRL+mouseclick picks a color for the button you clicked.


Zooming in/out with the mouse wheel is also pretty essential to me. I'd also like it if I could hold a hotkey (say, Alt) in order to use the mouse to drag the view around (i.e. while holding Alt, the mouse works quite like the Hand Tool in Adobe Reader).

See, I love the three-colour MSPaint drawing system. I'd enjoy four colours at my fingertips, and another button for colour select, but what can you do. As for the mouse wheel, due to the small sprites I make, I tend to use it for moving around the sheet.


So I'm thinking, would it be possible to have a customisable control scheme? Most games do it, and I've always wondered why applications don't. Just an idea. Maybe it's too hard to implement or whatever. But it would be cool.

Regardless, I think another option in the spriting/animation catalogue would be great. All the best.
 

[Pietepiet]

This is looking good. Keep it up!

One feature that I would absolute love to see is to have multiple pallet windows open at the same time, with the ability to load each one up with an external pallet file. GraphicsGale allows me to load and save pallets I make, and I use that a lot, but it only has a single pallet window where I have to put multiple pallets. It would be so much easier to just have a few pallet windows for quick pallet access.

[EDIT] Although the way you described making animations sounds...interesting at least, I'd much rather have the option to just add frames and animate using onion skinning. This, for me at least, is a much easier way of animating than to draw each frame next to each other in a sheet and THEN seeing if they even work well together. Seems like an outdated method if you ask me.

[muku]

Disclaimer: Not an artist here, but forced to sprite on occasion.

-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.

What I'd suggest is having additional blending modes available besides just standard alpha blending; multiply and inverse multiply (screen I think it's sometimes called?) for instance are quite useful for creating shadows and highlights without washing out the colors.

EDIT: Oh wait I may have actually been talking about different blending modes, regardless some of these are quite useful.

[kinnas]

One thing i think is great for making pixel art with graphics gale is when you right click you obtain the color you are over.

It makes things a lot quicker

that is the most annoying part of graphics gale and makes using it with a tablet pretty much impossible (assigning the right click to the pen button is also useless unless you have a bigger tablet because clicking the side button on the pen shifts the pen tip and you end up fussing around with picking wrong colours.)

fake edit: I didn't think of it before but I suppose assigning right click to one of the buttons on the tablet itself would sort of solve that problem but personally I don't really use the buttons on that thing with keyboard shortcuts being more familiar.

Generally speaking the best option is to have all shortcuts customizable.
Or have alt for colour picking and space for moving aroung the image, like most programs out there. Or at least the two more popular ones.

If I may propose a feature then have the canvas loose from edges of the canvas window. Like open canvas or painter (I think?). Otherwise working zoomed in on areas that are on the edge of the canvas area is very annoying, with a loose canvas you could just drag the picture area in the image window so the desired edge area is in the middle of the screen.

[Xion]

Or have alt for colour picking and space for moving aroung the image, like most programs out there. Or at least the two more popular ones.

hah that's one thing I really hate. I like the way GGale does it. It can be a little awkward with a tablet pen but I've gotten used to it. I also like the right-click+drag to select. But yeah customizable shortcuts for everything would be best, I think.

[johnnoz]

This is looking pretty fantastic, the method of animating would be great for creating sprite sheets for games but would be less convenient for standalone pixel art. Perhaps make both methods usable?

[deadeye]

It would be nice if there were some tile-making options as well.  There's a program out there (ProMotion, I think?) that allows you to set up a grid, and when you draw past the edge of a tile, it automagically draws into the opposite edge of the same tile, so making seamless tiles is easier.

I might not be explaining it very well, so here's a pixel art video tutorial I found at Pixelation that shows what I'm talking about in action:

http://www.wayofthepixel.net/pixelation/upload/pixelvids/mockup.avi
(Video uses the TechSmith codec)

Anyway, yeah.  That would be sweet.

[c-foo peng]

How about real alpha transparency? Color keying I do not want.

[Robotacon]

I think it's a great idea. I have a project of my own that does something similar but my project is tailor made for my own game so I don't think anyone else would like it.

Working with sprite sheets and working with tile sheets is fairly unsupported in all the pixel editors I've seen. In Promotion I have to create AnimStrips and manually assemble my sprite sheets and it's really killing creativity.

[Triplefox]

I've kicked around thoughts - and even tried implementing - a few pixel-art features, but I never developed them into a usable full-featured editor:

Palette-shifting colors: these are special colors that are aware of the palette you're using and let you advance the colors stepwise. That is, if you have a palette where every color contains multiple shades, and you're trying to add shading to your character, drawing with these colors lets you paint the shading onto the character incrementally, similar to how partial opacity works in other programs. I anticipate a time savings with this method because - assuming the palette is already set up for shading - you won't have to change colors as often.

Tile auto-bordering: One of my biggest frustrations with tiles is in building borders and edges. My ideal system would be some wizard to generate borders with various kinds of line styles, thicknesses, offsets, noisiness, randomization, alpha, etc. Then after generation, you can go in and make fine adjustments as needed.

Retrocomputing modes: Drawing with non-square pixel ratios, palette-per-scan-line-changes and other trickiness, etc. The first is probably most important, the others are nifty bonuses.

Tilemap previewing/paint-on-the-tilemap: Tile Studio already does the former, but it has a pretty limited image editor. The latter would be godly - especially if you could include sprites as well as tiles. Basically, you would start with some placeholder structure for your tiles and sprites, lay them out on a map, and then start adding detail everywhere. In this way you get a "permanent mockup" where you can tackle images piecemeal, or as part of a combined scene, while as much as possible the program deals with the semantics of what's going on.

Heightmap rendering modes: For games with overhead and isometric perspectives these could really save a ton of time. Essentially, it would be a wizard that lets you work in a 2d field, and be able to specify a height and three textures for each pixel, one for each of the three sides rendered(the texture could be another image, a 2d gradient, or a solid color - alpha transparency can be used for complex 3D effects). Lighting gradients can also be applied to each side. The difference between this and standard 3d techniques is that it retains the low-res, pixel-by-pixel mode of operation, so you can get some very precise detail.

A more complex version of this would be to do voxel editing; an editor and engine for voxel sprites was actually built for C&C: Tiberian Sun and C&C Red Alert 2. It probably wouldn't help for complex characters, but for items and vehicles, I could see some benefits. The heightfield approach is far easier to implement, though - I actually did that for a game with overhead terrain:

Press "e" to enter and exit the in-game editor. Then click the "buttons" at the lower left to change drawing modes.

 I procedurally generated tiles for all of it with a pseudo-heightfield implementation. I've left that game aside for the moment, but seeing the tech work in action was really cool and informative.

[deadeye]

So this zed-ex guy just disappeared after two posts?

Figures

[siiseli]

Looking sweet, please finish it :3

[Nitro Crate]

http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=3651.0 ?