Hey, I am looking for a program to make 2d sprites with. I really like Paint Shop Pro 7, but that is for wnidows. Are there any good free sprite 2d paint programs that you can make sprites with? Btw, I am using Red Hat. I saw a few preloaded called Icon Editor, and The GIMP, but I am not sure how well those would work. I thought the GIMP was more of an editor. Icon editor has a nice little grid and you just fill in the squares with colors to make sprites that way. That seems like it might work, but I am not sure about capatibility with SDL and such.

GIMP is the closest you can get instead of Photoshop as a native Linux app.

But you can also run Photoshop with Wine pretty good.

Well with the gimp you can create any kind of sprite, it''s a powerfull tool you should learn to use.

And If you play with the option, you can have a pixel grid so you can do icone, or pixel to pixel manipulation.

For SDL, it can only load BMP (and RLE BMP if I''m right)
You can use an add-on library called SDL_Image that will help you load jpeg, gif, png, and many more format.

Thanks for the quick replies
Although...
I can''t figure out how to make the squares...I looked everywhere in GIMP. I click on paint brush and the only solid shape I saw was a circle. I know this is a stupid question but how do you make squares in GIMP?

use the select rectangular regions tool (the first one on your menu probably, a rectangle made of dot)

Then hold the shift key and "draw" your cube (it will do a cube since you hold the shift key)

Then fill it with the color you want, you have a square

(But there's probably other better way to do that, I just don't know them)

[edited by - sadness on October 26, 2003 1:52:36 PM]

That works...but there must be easier ways...

Right click on the image, filters -> render -> pattern -> grid. It''s not great but it isn''t too bad either.


Hope this helps.

The programs on windows are much better.

Pro Motion
http://www.cosmigo.com/promotion/index.php

Is a great program for sprites.

GIMP isn''t really made for sprites. You''ll have a hard time using it for that.

Depending on your cup of tea and how `good` of a 2d artist you are you may find rendering your sprites easier than drawing them.

As far as renderers go you basicaly have two options I think, blender.org and povray.org .. If you can''t or don''t like to model but do like programming then pov might catch your eye (c like syntex to describe your scene/animation.)

I don''t recall off hand what the icon editor program can output but if nothing else you might be able to screen capture and then save in a format sdl can deal with. However I am going to guess (judging from the icon types on my system) that it can save as .png which should be optimal for SDL_image.

Luck

Oh, if you are not already familiar with it, ImageMagick is really handy too.

As for SDL, be sure to get the SDL_image library. It''s at:

http://www.libsdl.org/projects/SDL_image/

It has a loader that will load most image types so you''re not stuck to just BMP. There are quite a few SDL libraries. Chances are for whatever your project is, somebody has probably made a solution.

Cheers

PS. I recommend GIMP, once you get over the learning curve (read: RTFM) it''ll do anything you want and would be great for 2D bitmaps.