JazzJackrabbit Community Forums - View Single Post

Monolith · Feb 4, 2006, 08:28 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ice M A N

Anyone want to suggest the best system for putting sprites on a sprite sheet?

Ways I can think of:

1) find the max width and height of any frame of a set of anims (e.g. the "jazz" set, the "bilsy" set, the "weapons" set..) and make a grid of cells that size.

or

2) place a sprite in the top left, gap of like a pixel, next sprite, repeat, until the width is filled, then start on next line down far enough that it won't touch the above sprites (i.e. a crude closest packed system..)

Other questions:
How much padding between sprites?
Should the sprites be centered in the imaginary cells, or aligned to top-left or whatever corner?
Should there be bounding boxes drawn around them?
What color background?
How wide should the sprite sheet be? A constant, or around the width to make the entire sheet close to a square?
Should I also export a txt file giving the coordinates of each sprite? What format would be useful to fangame programmers?

Last night I ripped close to all of the sprites I had (only the anims in the shareware version, I don't have access to the full version at school (I'll get my brother to send it to me from home though)).. (like 3500+) and it took around 20 seconds.. certainly makes the by hand ripping look slow.. ;p

Sprite sheets are more useful to work with manually when frames of a particular animation are grouped together and seperated from other animations -- like one animation sequence on a row. Optimizing your extraction for fangames to use would be different because you want to try to pack them in as tightly as possible, and also have a way to lookup the animation set, locations, sizes, and offsets for all of the frames. It might be best to let fangames deal with how to arrange that themselves. Maybe just make a text file with any of that data that exists in the j2a file. Background should be color index 0, I think. I don't know about padding between frames.

Windows Explorer now generates thumbnails for the bitmaps, which is nice. Paint still can't open them, but I suspect that's because it just doesn't support top-down bitmaps. They seem fine in most everything else.