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1.2. Sprite Editor

Let’s start with the question – what are sprites and why would I need such a thing? Sprite is one or more images which are coupled together with information which your typical image never contain. As WME doesn’t support animated gifs, flc’s or other formats, it uses its internal sophisticated format for storing animations and other additional information. This files are called sprites.

Navigate in the Project Manager to the folder data→scenes→street→sprites. Right Click the folder and choose Add Sprite. The following window appears:

We’ll leave the left half of it for the template discussion and just fill in the new name of the sprite. We’ll name it sign2 as we’ll try to create the sprite we have there already. The purpose is to understand the process of the sprite creation with the ability to compare our tests with the already done file.

Click ok and then double click the newly created file in the Project manager to enter the Sprite Editor.

Let’s follow our way of introducing the tools and start with the section 1.

Every sprite consists of one or more images which are called frames. Sprite format also knows so called subframe, but we’ll get to this at the time.

As our sprite is empty so far, you can see that we have nothing available except the “new frame” icon. Let’s click it and navigate to the folder “data→scenes→street→sprites→sign” and choose a file sign00.bmp. Let me make a side note to supported formats. I actually ended up using only two graphic file formats – png and jpg. Png supports transparency and it’s well compressed without loosing quality. I use it for all sprites and overlays. Jpg is much smaller in size, but it has a toll in loosing the quality. I use it for backgrounds. Now there are some rigid graphic artists who don’t allow any compressions to their images. They can stick to png files but the toll is that their game will be much larger. So always make a decision somewhere in the reasonable middle. Is my game going to be an art gallery on 2 DVD’s or do I want to make a downloadable game? There are many options in the middle. Just use what suits you the best. The only format I avoid is bmp as it doesn’t bring anything new and it’s much larger then png + it doesn’t contain alpha channel.

But let’s get back to our sprite. We can see that there appeared in section 2 quite some properties.


 
wmebook/ch1_2.1196867999.txt.gz · Last modified: 2007/12/05 16:19 by metamorphium
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