I thought I would try and play around with gimp on my own. Picked a tile already downloaded from dizzyage and made it all look pretty.
Saved the file but now when I open up map editor and reload tiles folder is is lost all together. The original one that was just the 2 colors has gone along with the one that I did.
Does anyone know how I can get this back?
EDIT; Its fine I was being an idiot and saving it under a different compressed file. WOW I got a bit scared then lol
I'm having a real problem removing the "echo" left behind when you make an image into a tile and erase the background. Obviously, selecting the pixels and deleting/cutting them doesn't work. I can cover up the echo with white and then erase that but it still shows if you set the tile to "opaque" in the map editor. I've tried deleting the pixels, saving the tile, opening it in another program and deleting the area again and reopening and resaving it in another program all to no avail. I'm totally out of ideas! I've read a tutorial for tgaworks which I believe will help me to solve this but I've got no experience using the program and it looks like it will be quite time consuming. I'm more comfortable with GIMP or paint.net - is there a relatively quick method for only copying the pixels I want using either of these programs or should I just bite the bullet and learn to use tgaworks? Any help you guys could provide would be greatly appreciated!
Using TGA tools i think you have to merge to files together, so one of the colour image and the other is the white one. It's one of the things that really irritates me lol
I’m having a real problem removing the “echo” left behind when you make an image into a tile and erase the background. Obviously, selecting the pixels and deleting/cutting them doesn’t work. I can cover up the echo with white and then erase that but it still shows if you set the tile to “opaque” in the map editor. I’ve tried deleting the pixels, saving the tile, opening it in another program and deleting the area again and reopening and resaving it in another program all to no avail. I’m totally out of ideas! I’ve read a tutorial for tgaworks which I believe will help me to solve this but I’ve got no experience using the program and it looks like it will be quite time consuming. I’m more comfortable with GIMP or paint.net – is there a relatively quick method for only copying the pixels I want using either of these programs or should I just bite the bullet and learn to use tgaworks? Any help you guys could provide would be greatly appreciated!
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TBH it is a real problem in GIMP. I usually draw most of my tiles from scratch, then add the alpha channel when I'm done, that gets around it.
Have you tried copying the image into a new image with no alpha background, then adding the alpha afterwards? That should get rid of the echo.
You can use any package to create the two 'pictures' for the tile and if the package can't save the two images as a tgafile (tile) then as Meph says just implode them with tgaworks. Just create the picture of the object you want, give it a neutral background and save it as a bitmap file. Open it up and colour the 'object' white, then make the background black and save it with a different name (I usually just add an 'a' to the name). Then use tgaworks to implode them using the 'coloured' file as the RGB file and the black and white file as the ALPHA file.
Essentially the 'black' part of the B&W file becomes a 'mask' so that only the 'white' part (the actual object in the rgb file) is visible when the tga file (tile) is created.
Best to just use what works for you as long as you understand the basics. Corel Pro Photo works for me for design, but couldn't get the save as tga file to work properly so still use tgaworks to make the tile. As the basics of a tile is using a mask I can understand why Gimp was so named.
Thanks for all the replies guys! I tried out your suggestion Delta but it just didn't work.
I fiddled and groaned trying out various ideas with the GIMP and thought I'd finally cracked it when I went to: Layer / Transparency / Remove Alpha Channel and then: Edit / Copy Visible and pasted it into a new file. Unfortunately I'd been at it for so long I didn't realise I was looking at another tile entirely and couldn't figure out why I couldn't repeat the background scrub!
But I've finally solved the problem (to my satisfaction a least) now. It's a very simple method too: Instead of pasting the image into a brand new tile I made a new tile with a uniform light purple background and erased it, saved it as "blank tile" and pasted the tiles with the "echos" in them onto that, cropped them to the correct size and resaved each one with a new name. It seems the GIMP's "background echo memory" only lasts for one copy and paste if there's another echo on the thing you're pasting it onto. So essentially, what's caused the problem has actually solved it too!
The reason I've been copying all these images with backgrounds in the first place is that I'm making a complete 16bit tile set for dizzyage and I've been using video and maps as source material. I've done nearly all the tiles from Spellbound individually but I'm going to compile them as closely to how Alex has done for the 8bit tiles for ease of use. I plan to release each game's tiles individually as the style of the graphics differs quite a lot between Treasure Island and Crystal Kingdom and to my eyes they just don't sit well together. If there are requests to make a mega set of ALL of them I will certainly do so, and renumber them accordingly.
It's taken me almost three months in my spare time to just get Spellbound done so it'll be a while before everything is completed but I'm enjoying doing it and I plan on using them for a game of my own at some point so even if nobody else uses them it won't have been a total waste of time!
I think this thread was originally about the GIMP wasn't it?..