AuthorTopic: Best Program for Doing Animated Tiles?  (Read 6702 times)

Offline jams0988

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Best Program for Doing Animated Tiles?

on: March 03, 2019, 05:03:32 am
Hey guys! I've been working in GraphicsGale and Pyxel Edit forever, and love both, but there's no real easy way to do animated, seamless tiles in either of them. Anyone have a program that'll let me work on a tileset and animate the thing at the same time? Trying to do overworld tiles with rivers and swaying flowers and bushes and stuff, and it's a huge pain in the ass with the programs I'm currently using.

Thanks for any advice!

Offline eishiya

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Re: Best Program for Doing Animated Tiles?

Reply #1 on: March 03, 2019, 05:18:11 am
Sadly, no ): I usually do all my tiling testing on base non-animated tiles and then animate them after. When the animation is something complex where I need to preview both tiling and animation at once, my approach in Pyxel Edit is to lay the tiles out in such a way that I can see each frame as it tiles in context, while also having the frames in a row so Pyxel Edit can animate them.

I heard someone mention using a combination of Tiled and (your image editor of choice) saving directly to the PNG that gets read in and auto-updated by Tiled, which works best if you can have the two programs side by side so you don't have to switch between them. It's nowhere near as convenient as being able to edit and preview within a single editor, but it's something.

Offline strawberry

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Re: Best Program for Doing Animated Tiles?

Reply #2 on: March 03, 2019, 07:46:45 am
Aseprite will allow you to real-time edit while previewing animations

Offline jams0988

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Re: Best Program for Doing Animated Tiles?

Reply #3 on: March 03, 2019, 08:23:45 am
Thanks for the tips, eishiya.
You too, strawberry. I actually reinstalled Aseprite because you can view an animation as a tile. It might be my best bet for this, I guess. Still, it'd be even better if I could just animate the entire tileset directly...why the hell does Pyxel Edit use that weird shitty "view all frames at once!" thing instead of just using normal frames? It'd be so much better if it just let us flip through frames in tilesets, hahah! Ah well.

If anyone else has any recommendations, I'd be glad to hear them. For now, I'll just be copy-pasting tiles out of Pyxel Edit into Aseprite to animate them. Now my workflow will have three pixel art programs in it! Yay! :'D