Sprite Editing

Hi Everyone,

It's been many years since I used BB. I actually wrote two commercial games with the Amiga version but that was a long time ago and things feel a little bit disjointed with the new one, no manual etc.

I'm lost as to how to go about creating sprites! How is everyone doing this? How do you create sprite "banks" that can be loaded in one chunk instead of loading hundreds of seperate images? Any ideas on incbin and how that might work?

I just feel so lost with BlitzMax right now. I'm going to have to write some kind of editor for each sprite that can edit hit rectangles and place the "hotspot", is that right? It would be great if there was a tool for this already.

Cheers for any advice.

There are basic docs, but yes, it's tricky.

You can take a look here: http://www.blitzwiki.org/index.php/Main_Page
(editing disabled due to the avalanche of spam).



You can use an animimage for that, just have your image divided evenly (best to have one per sprite)


Incbin works by storing the files you want to use at runtime, see the wiki or the docs for a bit of info on it.

I create imagestrips for animated sprites- you need to save all your images in a strip (left to right) as one image. So a 32*32 image with 10 frames ends up as a 320*32 image. Use you choice of paint program.

Alanc5, take a look at this tutorial (part 7) on using animated images (link). Part 1 is here

That's not correct. For example, you can have a 64*64 file with 4*32*32 frames over 2 lines.
Alanc5, take a look at Assari's tutorials 'cos they're superb. Also check out Wave's Beginner's Guide as Bmax is very different to Amiga Blitz

Hmmm... didn't know that. Does it make any odds to the speed how you arrange the frames?

What 2 commercial games did you make?

Also don't forget to use 32 bit PNG with and 8bit alpha channel and nicely anti-aliased to transparent unless you want a retro look.

alanc5,

Where have you been dude? You have already missed 3 generations/incarnations of PC blitz!

Any way WELCOME to the fourth ! BlitzMax.

IPete2.

I remember that option too, I created one huge image normally containing all the players and afterwards there was an option to load the image and create smaller images by selecting the x and y coordinate for the left top and then the size in width and heigth for each smaller image...
It took me just 2 weeks after buying Blitz Basic 2 to write a simple game...
I hope indeed there is an easy way to do the same in Blitz Max, that way I could create some kind of grid with all players inside which makes it easier to draw them before adding them in Blitz when creating lot's of small enemy's for example...

Thats no problem.
Simply load it as animImage and you can split such an image up to frames which you then can draw :-)