Favorite Sprite editor

[toonski84]

I actually do most of my cuttin' with photoshop. All that stuff is sort of post-production. If you draw it in paint, you can finish it in photoshop. I just need a quick way to lay down pixels, and paint's system is perfect for me.

[Agamemnus]

I like pp256.

I don't like pixel editing in photoshop. Mainly because it dithers images, and I don't know how to turn that off.

[oracle]

GIMP

[na_th_an]

I actually do most of my cuttin' with photoshop. All that stuff is sort of post-production. If you draw it in paint, you can finish it in photoshop.

Of course, but I don't need to switch programs

I just need a quick way to lay down pixels, and paint's system is perfect for me.

Yeah, but my DP is just a double-click away what can be quicker?

[adosorken]

The GIMP? Eww......... gawd did I ever hate that program! Made me beg to have Windows back and good ole PSP7

[adosorken]

listen, you gots 256 colors... you go around throwing 32 colors here, and 64 colors there, you wont have much room for variety.

You sound like you've developed on consoles before but when it comes to QB, a sprite which uses 16 colors is going to take the same amount of memory as a sprite that uses 200 colors. I use two standard palettes for the game I'm working on right now, and save one small run of 16 entries for custom mini-palettes. Designing a palette scheme is super-easy if you know how to plan ahead.

[toonski84]

Yeah, but in screen 13 you have 256 unique colors, that's it. While you can make a general palette with a couple gradients and use a billion colors on a 16x16 sprite, you want to keep color counts down so you can make sprites with interesting colors, that you might not use in others. Using an efficient amount of colors is necessary if you have a color limit at all.

[adosorken]

Something a lot of Mugen developers do, which can easily be applied here, is to create one master palette from all the game graphics that will be used at one particular time. Basically...all the graphics go onto a large image file, then that image file is reduced to 256 unique colors. It is the most highly effective way of maxxing out your palette.

[na_th_an]

Well, I prefer toonski technique 'cause it allows easier palette effects in the game. For example fading out the background leaving the sprites lit.

[toonski84]

Goody, being efficient with palettes now has my namesake attached Unless you mean giving objects their own palette. In that case, well yeah

Adsorken/Nek, Forgiving that your referring to Mugen developers for advice , automatic palette reduction is a decent trick. Usually you can get rid of some redundent colors that way. But if you go overboard, it's going to make slips and errors. Oftentime it can ruin a lot of the anti-aliasing. But 2 times out of 3 it does an okay job.

I say a lot of stuff that most people, especially the sort that plays videogames, wouldnt care about. I'm a perfectionist, so I excuse myself to do it though