Best PC program for sprite animation
Re: Best PC program for sprite animation
I've just realised I can't happily go on holiday now until my ZXDS Sprite Editor can (a) play animations and (b) do 8x2 multicolour... Oh bugger....
Re: Best PC program for sprite animation
OK, it can do both of those now. Anyone interested in trying it out themselves? Do your sprite design on the train...
Although you'd manually have to extract the data from a snapshot when you get home, as it doesn't have an export function.
Re: Best PC program for sprite animation
I'll see if I can knock up some instructions and present something before I go on holiday.
The basic version does up to 24x24 pixel sprites with regular attributes, and stores up to 255 of them.
You can now play animations (if they're in order) and also place multiple (animating) sprites on an 'Arrange' workscreen and watch them animate, or see how they line-up to make larger graphics. And it remembers how you placed them for when you switch between the Edit and Arrange screens. Cut+Paste of whole sprites works, but there's no in-sprite-pixel-scroll function. Mainly because I've run out of button-combos to control it!
I guess it would work well under emulation on a desktop if you can map a joypad buttons to extra keys. It's probably not much good on a real Spectrum as it uses multi-button keystrokes. And to extract the sprites you'd want to save them straight out of memory as binaries and probably manipulate the data into your own sprite format.
But it looks good, and I've found I can fairly quickly replicate sprites I've already drawn somewhere else.
The 8x2 multicolour version is a bit more flaky. It only has a crude multicolour renderer to show a single sprite near the top of the screen, so it doesn't have the 'Arrange' mode for multiple sprites. And it's not very stable yet either. And is only set for 48K timing! But apart from that...
The basic version does up to 24x24 pixel sprites with regular attributes, and stores up to 255 of them.
You can now play animations (if they're in order) and also place multiple (animating) sprites on an 'Arrange' workscreen and watch them animate, or see how they line-up to make larger graphics. And it remembers how you placed them for when you switch between the Edit and Arrange screens. Cut+Paste of whole sprites works, but there's no in-sprite-pixel-scroll function. Mainly because I've run out of button-combos to control it!
I guess it would work well under emulation on a desktop if you can map a joypad buttons to extra keys. It's probably not much good on a real Spectrum as it uses multi-button keystrokes. And to extract the sprites you'd want to save them straight out of memory as binaries and probably manipulate the data into your own sprite format.
But it looks good, and I've found I can fairly quickly replicate sprites I've already drawn somewhere else.
The 8x2 multicolour version is a bit more flaky. It only has a crude multicolour renderer to show a single sprite near the top of the screen, so it doesn't have the 'Arrange' mode for multiple sprites. And it's not very stable yet either. And is only set for 48K timing! But apart from that...