AuthorTopic: Recomendations for a good tileset imaging program?  (Read 5336 times)

Offline Lazy Brain Games

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Recomendations for a good tileset imaging program?

on: January 22, 2011, 07:16:12 am
Hi all! This is my first post on pixelation, this is an awesome site! I'm no stranger to pixel art, although I will admit I've never done any tilesets at such a low resolution as I'm doing now. I use photoshop for everything, but photoshop isn't really set up for tiling. In the past I just used the tileset section of GM to handle my tiling needs. Now I'm running into a problem with the resolution, it's too small, and I have no way of making it bigger! So, I thought I'd ask for some recommendations for a tileset program that can output image files. A zoom feature and simplicity of use are a proirity, but I'll take what I can get :P

Regards,

-Johnny B.

Offline ptoing

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Re: Recomendations for a good tileset imaging program?

Reply #1 on: January 22, 2011, 01:35:33 pm
Cosmigo Promotion has a Tilemap feature. It's very handy and basically what it does it autocomplete tiles as you work on them:

Imagine you have a level made from tiles drawn out and you wanna change a tree somewhere, now if you change those tiles all the other instances get changed as well.
You can also specify x and y flipping and a limit with up to 9999 tiles, plus it can export a few formats of tilemaps and makes a tilesheet for you.

I know I am sounding like an advertisment here, but I am sure other people can attest to what I said, and I have used this professionally since quite a while.
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Offline TomF

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Re: Recomendations for a good tileset imaging program?

Reply #2 on: January 22, 2011, 02:45:32 pm
Most experienced pixel artists will generally recommend either Promotion or graphics gale for pixels. I feel Promotion has the advantage for static images, especially tiles because of the reasons ptoing gave.

You can see the tilemap feature in action here:

http://www.wayofthepixel.net/pixelation/upload/pixelvids/mockup.avi

Offline ptoing

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Re: Recomendations for a good tileset imaging program?

Reply #3 on: January 22, 2011, 02:48:33 pm
That is the old tile completion feature in Promotion 5.1, the one in 6 is MUCH more powerful.
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Offline Carnivac

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Re: Recomendations for a good tileset imaging program?

Reply #4 on: January 22, 2011, 06:46:42 pm
Most experienced pixel artists will generally recommend either Promotion or graphics gale for pixels. I feel Promotion has the advantage for static images, especially tiles because of the reasons ptoing gave.

You can see the tilemap feature in action here:

http://www.wayofthepixel.net/pixelation/upload/pixelvids/mockup.avi

I've used Pro Motion for years but never used that before (I was never sure how it worked) but that video has shown that's exactly the sort of thing I needed a while ago when getting fed up with some issues I was having with tiiling.  An excellent feature.  Will have to play about with it if and when I get to pixelling again.  Damn, Pro Motion is awesome.
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Offline TomF

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Re: Recomendations for a good tileset imaging program?

Reply #5 on: January 22, 2011, 07:53:19 pm
And there we have another reason to use promotion; the developer listens to user feedback and adjusts the program accordingly. I just downloaded the demo of 6, and yeah it's superb. The tilemap is the one feature gale really lacks imo.

Offline setz

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Re: Recomendations for a good tileset imaging program?

Reply #6 on: January 23, 2011, 12:25:36 am
Cosmigo Promotion has a Tilemap feature. It's very handy and basically what it does it autocomplete tiles as you work on them:

Imagine you have a level made from tiles drawn out and you wanna change a tree somewhere, now if you change those tiles all the other instances get changed as well.
You can also specify x and y flipping and a limit with up to 9999 tiles, plus it can export a few formats of tilemaps and makes a tilesheet for you.

I know I am sounding like an advertisment here, but I am sure other people can attest to what I said, and I have used this professionally since quite a while.

I can attest to this. I got into game development recently, and thought to try out the tilemap features before even getting a map editor: it works beautifully. In tilemap mode theres a "sync mode" checkbox, when its checked editing one tile edits all of them, when its unchecked, you can draw freely, and check it again to generate any new tiles that might have been made. Ontop of this, its an extremely great pixel editor, and exports to a variety of formats. For example, the TXM formats integrate seamlessly with flixel, but any programmer worth his salt would be able to write a script to convert them to whatever is needed.

Making things even more convenient is the brush container: if you have a few smaller tiles you usually use in conjunction, you can just add them as a brush and draw at will, very useful.

Here is a screenshot i took while making the cave ground tiles, although I feel I should suggest against doing 8x8 tiles: it gives a lot of flexibility, but sure is tedious when you're making hundreds of screens. Also note that the thumbnail/preview window can be zoomed too! I have it at 2x since thats how my graphics are displayed.

The only problem might be simplicity, it can take awhile to really learn your way around the program if you're not used to it. Its not exactly MS Paint, its very powerful, but requires some learning to use.

Offline Lazy Brain Games

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Re: Recomendations for a good tileset imaging program?

Reply #7 on: January 23, 2011, 06:07:48 am
Thanks for all the replys! I've downloaded the trial version of promotion, so I'm currently checking out all the nifty features :) I did a number of searches for something like this, but I couldn't find anything :P Thanks for your help! I wouldn't of ever found this without your help! Thank you!

-Johnny B.

Offline Carnivac

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Re: Recomendations for a good tileset imaging program?

Reply #8 on: January 23, 2011, 09:03:11 am
The only problem might be simplicity, it can take awhile to really learn your way around the program if you're not used to it. Its not exactly MS Paint, its very powerful, but requires some learning to use.

For a lot of us older pixel people it helps that it's based on Deluxe Paint so a lot of us feel pretty much at home using it, certainly I've always found MS Paint a total bitch to work with because I used Deluxe Paint extensively being that I was around during the Amiga era.  The problem with me is that I seem to have been treating it purely as a DP clone for Windows and haven't really explored it's own features like the tile mapping functions.  If I ever get some time to devote to pixelling again I really should check out that stuff.
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