In-built bitmap editor...

[Sythe]

Hi,

This is directed more at Chris than as a topic for discussion although feel free to comment.

I have come to dread swapping out sprites and exporting to modify then re-importing. It's a pain in the ass.

When I was a kid I used to use something you probably all know called ‘The Games Factory' (formally Click and Play) dun dun dun. Although it has a poor engine and is shocking to make games with it does have a cute way of managing sprites with its own inbuilt bitmap and animation editor which looks something like this:






I think a similar interface for AGS would be alarmingly simple to code as most of the mspaint functions are actually GDI APIs. In fact, there is already a simple bitmap editor for the walkable area and hotspots in AGS, if I am not mistaken.

Considering that about half the games made with AGS have mspaint graphics anyway wouldn't it be a nice addition to have an inbuilt bitmap editor? It would also be useful for touching up import errors which occasionally occur.

Additionally it would speed up production of small games and the authors wouldn't have to worry about loosing frames from sequences and so on.

It just seems to me that AGS really does lack its own bitmap editor, considering that it does store the imported bitmaps in its own data structure independent of the files they were imported from it seems a logical conclusion that the user should be able to edit the in-editor bitmaps.

Anyway theres my 5 cents. I'm probably about to get gunned down by people telling me to think ahead when creating sprites but such as life

[scotch]

Game Maker does this as well, and I think it can be useful for minor edits.  I just use the clipboard copying/pasting functions if I need to do that right now, but if this is very simple to add it'd be worth it.

[CaptainBinky]

I think that a built-in sprite editor would be a pretty neat idea from a "completeness" perspective, however the problem I find with these types of things is that the built in editor is rarely as good as a seperate package designed purely for sprite creation. This is purely due to the amount of time you can spend developing it given all the other aspects of AGS that get updated every version.

So, to me, the best solution is what was discussed in this thread:

http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=24442.0

Where sprites are referenced from files on disk. Then you only need to save over the sprites in whatever editor you use, and re-run your game in AGS and the sprites would all be "sucked" in.

[SupSuper]

Wouldn't it just be easier to have some sort of Edit button in the Sprite Manager which would open the sprite in your favorite graphics editing program? At least it'd be faster than always going Right-Click Sprite > Copy > Open MSPaint > Paste > Make Changes > Right-Click Sprite > Paste.

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

I agree that it would be useful to have a low-budget graphic editor in ags to correct minor issues like transparency.  Not really needed, but useful.

[2ma2]

Since you now can preview animation in AGS, I think copy-pasteing is suitable for quick alterations and tweaking of sprites BUT, this only works with highcolor sprites and not 256 color ones. Since AGS remaps the sprites indexes, how come?

[strazer]

Wouldn't it just be easier to have some sort of Edit button in the Sprite Manager which would open the sprite in your favorite graphics editing program? At least it'd be faster than always going Right-Click Sprite > Copy > Open MSPaint > Paste > Make Changes > Right-Click Sprite > Paste.

This has been suggested before: http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/tracker.php?action=detail&id=251