Keen: Modding

I know that in another well-visited thread (which I fail to dig up at the moment) the "old" MS Paint is recommended for editing CK sprites. That does work for me, still it lacks some kind of comfort.

I went into the trouble trying several other sprite editors, but none of them was able to save the palette correctly :( I am in search of solutions for the following:

- Opening multiple BMPs at once for reason of easy comparison and copy-paste actions
- Some kind of automated shading if possible
- A way to make it easier to create sprite shapes for the tilesets that need one
- Anything else that you know is very handy :)

What is your favorite sprite editing tool and what is your approach to these obstacles?

Personally, I use GIMP. It allows for easy editing of multiple open files and handles palettes without problem. Dunno about automated shading, but in my experience shading needs tuning by hand anyway. Not really sure what you mean by your 3rd point, so...

Kolourpaint (basically improved MS Paint with shortcut keys) and GIMP are still my weapons of choice. GIMP only for pasting and saving the modified graphics, because Kolourpaint screws around with the palette when not saving in true colour.

The main problem is that Kolourpaint is a KDE program and thus is designed to run on Linux only. It can be installed on Windows, but you need to install the entire KDE back-end port along with it.

GIMP still makes me terribly uncomfortable when trying to use it for drawing pixel art.

I don't find the multiple files thing to be such an issue for this purpose. Linux workspaces = good enough for keeping several open Kolourpaint windows organised when necessary.

Darik wrote:Not really sure what you mean by your 3rd point, so...

what about Macromedia Flash MX? it has more effective tools, and it can usually be converted to paint images without too much error.

Flash has effective tools for working with /vector/ images. It is completely, utterly unsuited to working with sprites. Plus, I think we're kind of aiming for free tools.

well, just sayin', if you have it, that's great, if not, don't sweat it.

but i might've found an oversight; images shrink by several times once they are transported from flash to paint, and once you size up those, they would be nice and blocky.

If you were for some crazy reason going the vector route, Inkscape would be far more suitable, though maybe slightly less hilarious.

What gets me is how many programs go 'Way-hey! What's a palette for?' and mess everything up, they'll even save in a different format, changing 16 color to 256 color or the reverse. What kind of moron writes a program like that?

gimp, graphics gale, sometimes photoshop.

Thanks for your replies :) I always struggle with GIMP as I find it quite counter-intuitive; yet, it is a very valuable tool if you have the right tutorials at hand.

And yes, me too wonders why all these paint programs have tons of features but are incapable of preserving the palette. I mean, the palette exists for a reason oO

I suppose bitmaps and GIFs are old technology, abandonded in favor of JPGs, and if you're a neat freak, PNGs.

GIMP is the best free program I've found so far when it comes to colour formats. It does only what you want it to do, and doesn't screw around making 8Bit graphics out of 4Bit ones.
Sadly it lacks the basic features Line, Square and Circle. But I still use it for most of my pixel work
Beside that I can only recommend Allegro Sprite Editor. It's a neat little program meant to create animated gifs I think, but it has said missing features Line and such.

Uh, it has a perfectly good line tool. Hold... shift? I think it's shift, while using the pencil tool. LINES

Squares are easy to construct manually. Circles... you might be able to get away with manually stroking a circular selection.