Thread: Where do you get your sprites?

Helo,

I'm starting on Allegro now. I wonder where you all get your sprites from?

Do you download them from the web? Which sites are the best?

Do you draw them yourself? How? Do you just draw the picture then make the background pink (255 0 255) or something?

Is there some sort of a sprite editor that you can take a picture for example and choose the bg color you want to be transparent and it automatically outputs a bitmap?

the ones with 2 images, one the sprite itself, and the other one with the shape of the sprite (white) on a black background... Forgot what it's called

masking, its so that you dont have to stare at a rectangular sprite.

I use POV-Ray to create my sprites and PSP to clean them up.

That's why color keying is awesome. What's even better is images with alpha information built in; it can make some pretty tight sprites.

I usually make my own sprites. I can do some pretty good pixel-by-pixel work (just takes a while on high resolutions to make something of any size). When developing my engines though, I don't put much into the sprites, I usually just put fillers in until I work out some good ones.

But when you made a new format, how do you display onto the screen? I want all my sprites to look good .

And how do you generate a mask? What IS a mask? I just started using Allegro, so the only way i know how to make sprites is to make something's background pink. Is that a mask? Please explain.

And all the alpha stuff, how do you use it? Is that related to Allegro? Or you have to write the graphic routines yourself?

One problem i was having with my pong game is that the ball has pink edges. I used fill in photoshop but there are always some pinkish pixels in between.

Hope someone can explain the above questions, as i am 'relatively' new to graphics. I just ordered the tricks book btw.

Hunter:
So you don't use paint now? What do you use.

About the pink edges, it is probably photoshop doing that. Turn off the anti-aliasing crap in photoshop.

A mask is an image used to make your images not have to look square. It is used in combination with the original image to achieve the effect. The only time I ever had to use this method is when I was working with GDI. Allegro and DirectDraw just uses color-keying, which is where it checks the pixels when it blits for if they are "magic pink" or whatever you fancy. Direct3D uses the alpha channel. I don't know what OpenGL uses.

When you make your own format, you usually draw it the same way you draw a bitmap. Just use a blit. You just have to create some functions to load up your file and fill up a variable, structure, etc. Then you need to make a function to draw the sprite. A simple way would be to do a loop that reads the value of each pixel of the image and plot it in the correct position. You could also translate it into another format's structure and blit it (like if you already have a structure that represents a bitmap, just fill it up with the data you got from your file). It would be better to just make your own blitter though.

Can anyone post few examples or those alpha/transparent masked sprites?