[Nexinarus_lazy]

Hey. I've been looking for a sprite editor after using pp256 for a little while. What editors do you guys use for the rpg's?

Me and a friend have been pitching in to make a sprite editor for 8bit images in DOS but now it seems not so good, high-color sprites would be nice. Im having trouble expanding this to windows or whatever.

I have seen The GIMP and a few tools but not impressed yet.

[Ninkazu]

Photoshop. The GIMP is very close though.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I use Adobe Photoshop for all graphics - it can do just about any raster graphic job you care to throw at it, and then some. I've been using it almost daily for seven or eight years, and there are still features I haven't delved into.

I've heard some people bashing it for pixel art and RPG tiles, but for the life of me, I can't see why. Once you learn a few keyboard shortcuts, you can really fly with it, and it has just about everything you would want to do RPG tiles with: straightforward palette controls, both pixel-perfect and anti-aliased drawing, semi-opaque drawing, stylus support, easy zooming and panning, powerful selection and adjustment tools, good text controls, multiple channel support, layers with multiple application modes, massive undo's, lots of options for conversion of 32-bit color to indexed color, and you can work with just about any file format you would want.

(And the real bonus is that it really works well with any raster graphics - you can manipulate your photos, prepare textures for 3D, prepare web graphics, etc.)

It's a little on the pricey side of course, but the consumer version, Adobe Photoshop Elements, is affordable, and basically strips out the stuff you wouldn't use anyway if you're not a high-end user. For instance, they remove the ability to modify extra channels directly (but you can still work with an 8-bit opacity channel), they simplify the adjustment capabilities (for instance, you don't have precise duotone controls), etc.

[janus]

PSP8 is almost as good as Photoshop for most work and costs a lot less. Give the demo a shot.

Be warned, though. They rewrote it from scratch and it's built on python, so it uses a bit more RAM and CPU power than your average image editor. (Still manages to be faster than Photoshop in most cases, though.)

[Bjorn]

I think for Windows there is only the old GIMP 1.2.5, but they've just released GIMP 2.0pre3 and I expect there will be stable 2.0 relatively soon. GIMP 2.0 is a huge improvement from 1.2.5 in my opinion and it's the only thing I currently use for art (for example, the Chione Challenge image was made with the GIMP).

[Sirocco]

I use Autodesk Animator for anything and everything 8bpp, and The Gimp for anything else. Fenix Blade's graphics, for example, were completely done using Autodesk Animator. It's antiquated... but it runs fine under Win9x and even 2000, and has a ton of tools and drawing filters.

I've used Graphics Gale and PSP, but they lack many of the drawing filters AA has, as well as easy palette management.

.

[Rainer Deyke]

I use Tile Studio for pretty much everything. It's not the greatest bitmap editor ever, but the built-in map editor makes it worthwhile.

[Nexinarus_lazy]

Thanks everyone.