How do you test sprite animations?

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M_Tee
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Re: How do you test sprite animations?

Post by M_Tee »

I use Photoshop, but it's because I've long been familiar with the software for work, school, and hobby purposes.

With the right settings in place, it's useful for doing all the pixel work I need to do.

Off the top of my head, my NES graphics settings include:
  • An NES palette as Swatches, ordered and labeled.
  • 16 pixel grid with 2 subdivisions
  • Pixel Grid turned on (displays at zoom of higher than 600% in CS4 and newer). I especially like Photoshop's pixel grid because it is visually non-distracting.
  • All tools' anti-aliasing settings off. All scaling modes set to Nearest Neighbor.
  • A series of custom keyboard shortcuts for common tasks, such as toggling grid visibility, H and V flips, rotates, snap to grid, etc.
Moreover, I've recorded actions for a lot of things like updating the chr file, etc.

Its Frame Animation feature is as functional as I need for preview animation, and it's nice to be able to preview animations on the fly while I'm working on the art.
Bananmos
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Re: How do you test sprite animations?

Post by Bananmos »

I would highly recommend Pro Motion for any sprite animation. There's a reason Shovel Knight's graphics were done with it. I don't think any other pixel program comes close for pixel artwork/animations.

Of course, it isn't a complete solution the as any efficient toolflow for creating sprite animations also needs to do these basic conversion steps to not totally waste space :
1) Find which frames are unique among animation frames
2) Convert those to CHR / OAM data
3) Generate animation data with frame references, offsets etc for each converted animation frame

...but those things don't require that much software engineering at the end of the day, and they will pay off when you have a good tool to iterate on, removing the build-and-run cycle when working on graphics.
M_Tee
Posts: 430
Joined: Sat Mar 30, 2013 12:24 am
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Re: How do you test sprite animations?

Post by M_Tee »

That looks really useful. Thanks for that link.
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