Which Sprite/Map/Block/Character editor is recommended?

[elmer]

I guess that my old editor really isn't going to cut it anymore, without some serious updating ... (see below).

The last that I remember, ProMotion had a good reputation as an editor ... but that was a long time ago.

I thought that I'd ask ... what are people using these days?

[Arkhan]

NeoPaint is pretty good for indexed palette mode editing without a ton of extra BS like Photoshop has.

I use a combination of NeoPaint and PaintShopPro for image editing (when I have to), because of their friendly palette editors.

Neither is free, though.    NeoPaint is pretty cheap.   

Free + Indexed Palette support that isn't mental: 
Grafx2 (DOS or Win32.  It's Amiga DPaint style.  You might like it)
GIMP:  Useful for reversing color maps that Photoshop has reversed.

As for map editing, we use Mappy because it's pretty wysiwyg, and pukes out simple blocks of data for the map.   You can barf out CSVs, C style arrays, and stuff.    It's pretty handy and supports 8x8/16x16 tile maps

http://tilemap.co.uk/mappy.php
https://code.google.com/p/grafx2/
http://www.neosoftware.com/npw.html

[touko]

With grafx2 you can directly work in 9bit, but it's an old school graphical interface, a bit rustic, but it does the job ..

[elmer]

...
http://tilemap.co.uk/mappy.php
https://code.google.com/p/grafx2/
http://www.neosoftware.com/npw.html

Thanks for the suggestions and the links.

I'll have to take a look  at NeoPaint sometime ... in the meantime I do have PhotoShop for an high-color work, and it looks like there are other alternatives for paletted work.

For the paletted work, as you guessed, I'm most comfortable with a dpaint-style interface. dpaint/danim really ruled the 16-bit world for many years.

It was good to see grafx2, as I hadn't been aware of it. It looks very familiar, and quite powerful, and the hi-res support is very welcome.

It's absolutely as ugly as it's possible for a graphics editor to be ... but it's open-source, so that's fixable if it annoys me enough.

I should give more time to learning to use "ProMotion" (http://www.cosmigo.com/promotion/index.php) since I've had a license to that for years and, at least according to it's website, it's still in use by the pros. It has some very powerful layering and onion-skinning capabilities, and also has map editing.

As for maps ... I'd heard of mappy before ... but had forgotten about it.

It looks really good, and above-all, simple to use, so I just registered it, and will probably end up using it. It's always nice to see someone still exporting in the classic old Amiga-IFF format.

With grafx2 you can directly work in 9bit, but it's an old school graphical interface, a bit rustic, but it does the job

It's very familiar ... and it's still sort-of-active, so it'll be interesting to see how easy it is to compile.

It was funny to see that the author has been doing homebrew work on the Amstrad CPC and Thompson M05.

Hahaha ... there's a Thomson TO8 on eBay right now ... just gotta resist!!! 

[touko]

Oh man, you know Thomson's computers , very surprising 
I thought they were only known in France ..

[elmer]

Oh man, you know Thomson's computers , very surprising 
I thought they were only known in France ..

Haha ... I can also spell colour and aluminium correctly! 

A friend did a game on one, but I never got to play with them ... always wanted to (for the 6809).

I did have an Oric Atmos though, if that helps ... I seem to remember that they did OK in France.

[Arkhan]

Grafx2 is what I used for the entirety of Insanity's artwork, including importing a scan of the cover art and dithering it down to 16-color for the title screen. 

What's funny is, if you f*ck with the palettes, you can actually change the colors of the buttons in the interface.

To me it's got the most accessible/straightforward way to deal with PCX images, and it is pretty powerful for this sort of thing.  The copy/pasting is a bit odd at first but is pretty good once you figure it out. 

I used the DOS version in an emulator doing 320x240 resolution + scanlines, so I got a fairly decent approximation of what the stuff would look like on a real PCE.    Blues are a royal pain in the dick to get to look nice.

I switched to NeoPaint mostly because it is about the same, but had some other things I was trying and screwing with.

You can also be an ass and use DOSBox + PC Paintbrush.   


The MagicKit/HuC libs function well with PCX + FMP (fmp = mappy files).

So, if you don't stray from that, you'll have an OK time.   

Just make sure you save the PCX as the 4 plane ones, or the libs stroke out.

[touko]

Yes oric was popular in france,a very good computer .

Thomson was not bad too, but with his poor graphic capabilities (no hardware sprites or scrolling) , this were not a good choice for a gaming machine ..

but you're true, the 6809 is a cool cpu to work with .

[elmer]

Grafx2 is what I used for the entirety of Insanity's artwork, including importing a scan of the cover art and dithering it down to 16-color for the title screen.

Great ... it's good to know that it is stable.

I took a look at its docs, and it looks like it supports animated layers, lust like danim, so there's really no reason not to use it.

You can also be an ass and use DOSBox + PC Paintbrush.

If I want to go that crazy, I can run my old copies of dpaint/danim as well! 

The MagicKit/HuC libs function well with PCX + FMP (fmp = mappy files).

So, if you don't stray from that, you'll have an OK time.   

Just make sure you save the PCX as the 4 plane ones, or the libs stroke out.

I'll just follow the old adage ... "never do at run time what you can do at build time".

Everything will be preprocessed ... no reason to load an RLE-compressed PCX when there's much better compression available.

but you're true, the 6809 is a cool cpu to work with .

CoCo3FPGA

A nice hardware-emulated (or re-implemented, as they prefer to say) 6809 machine with it's graphics enhanced from the original chipset. That's something that I find amazingly cool.

Can you imagine a PCE running at 21MHz with 256-color backgrounds and sprites? That's the kind of thing that could be done in hardware on an FPGA these days. 

[Arkhan]

Yeah, it doesn't do it at run time.   I meant the #include stuff that processes the files. 

[touko]

Can you imagine a PCE running at 21MHz with 256-color backgrounds and sprites?

Of course, and it has a name : PCFX 

[elmer]

Can you imagine a PCE running at 21MHz with 256-color backgrounds and sprites?

Of course, and it has a name : PCFX 

Hahaha ... got me! 

[Gredler]

Sorry for the noob intervention here.


I have been creating artwork that retains the limitations of # of colors, and resolution. The engine I am using is modern and does not limit these things, so I have to manage this manually.


I only use photoshop, pixel brushes and not anti aliasing on shapes and selections. I am very careful with what colors are in the image, and export them with a limited pallet to ensure there are no extra colors.


Is there a reason I should not be creating my sprite sheets only in photoshop, or is it a convenience thing for porting down to PCE specifically?


Thanks!

[ccovell]

One reason you shouldn't is that Photoshop saves palette data backwards in PCX images, if I recall, so you might run into headaches when importing them in HuC/MagicKit.

[elmer]

One reason you shouldn't is that Photoshop saves palette data backwards in PCX images, if I recall, so you might run into headaches when importing them in HuC/MagicKit.

Haha ... I hadn't hit that one ... guess that my artists in the Photoshop era always exported in BMP/TGA/PNG ... but thanks, it's good to know that the problem is there.

He can always export in a different format and then use IrfanView or something else to convert it into a PCX if he needs to ... but that's a bit of an ugly work-around.

Sorry for the noob intervention here.

No apology needed ... we all had to start somewhere ... and this seems like a good place to ask. 

You said that you're using a "modern" engine ... do you mean that you're doing a "retro" project in something like Unity, or that you're actually targeting real PCE hardware in something like HuC?

I have been creating artwork that retains the limitations of # of colors, and resolution. The engine I am using is modern and does not limit these things, so I have to manage this manually.

I'm not sure exactly what you mean here about the number of colors ... do you mean the 16-per-character or 256-per-background/spriteset, or maybe the 512-color-3-bit-rgb-palette ?

The PCE has the usual 4th-generation 16-colors-per-individual-character-or-sprite ... but most people at the time used programs like Deluxe Paint or Deluxe Anim in 256-color mode to "simulate" up to 16 different 16-color palettes ... perfect for the PCE's 16-palette backgrounds and 16-palette sprites.

I only use photoshop, pixel brushes and not anti aliasing on shapes and selections. I am very careful with what colors are in the image, and export them with a limited pallet to ensure there are no extra colors.

Is there a reason I should not be creating my sprite sheets only in photoshop, or is it a convenience thing for porting down to PCE specifically?

Use whatever feels comfortable to you that still lets your programmer get the data in a format that they can use ... that's your only real limit ... and the only thing that really matters.

There's no "absolutely-the-only-way" here ... only things that are easier and harder.

Photoshop was specifically written to do 24-bit "true-color" graphics and replace the old 256-color-or-less paletted graphics programs.

It sort-of handles paletted graphics ... but it's workflow really isn't designed around them.

I know that people have used it to do those ... but I suspect that most artists quickly move on to something else like "ProMotion" or maybe the "grafx2" or "NeoPaint" that have been mentioned, that make it easy to work with and manipulate paletted graphics.

By the 6th-generation (i.e. PS2), Photoshop use was very common ... but often combined with Macromedia (now Adobe) Fireworks, which was one of the few programs at the time (and even now AFAIK) that could handle paletted-alpha.

If you'd be happier with a recommendation, then personally, I'd probably point you at "grafx2" right now ... but it's really up to you (and your programmer).