Best Drawing program to make sprites?

[J-Golden]

I haven't made it secret that I’m looking to get into game making on the Amiga and am now trying to figure out which programs would best compliment it.  I've got some really good input from other reliable sources, but I the kind of guy who really likes to get a plethora of ponderances; guidance galore; an avalanche of advice.:cool:

So, I need a program that will help me create, work on, delete by mistake, recreate, edit, animate, delete by mistake again, recreate again and insert into the games I'm making.

Oh, and just plain drawing too for like backdrops, objects to interact with etc.

I've always heard Deluxe Paint was good, but I can only find ver III (3) on E-Bay right now.  Would IV (4) or V (5) be better or have tools that would make getting an earlier version a mistake?

But outside Dpaint, are there any other sprite creator/animator & drawing progs. you all would recommend?

[Thorham]

Always get the latest version, and because those programs aren't sold anymore, except second hand (makers of the program don't get a cent of this money), don't bother buying it on ebay, just download a copy of the latest version. Remeber, second hand software does not benefit the makers at all, and probably isn't always legal either.

As for other programs, there's also Brilliance and Personal Paint.

[J-Golden]

What makes Brillance and PPaint good programs?  I've heard of them, but don't know their uses and strong points.
 
Oh, and for now I mainly need the program to do 64-color Half-Bright lowres (ECS/OCS stuff) sprites and backdrops but as I learn to code (ha ha) I hope to get into the higher color depths and resolutions...

[Jose]

AFAIR Brilliance can work with 24bit pics better than the other 2. I think DPaint only started to support 24bit by version V. PPaint can only work in 8bit but has very good color reduction routines that make up for building very good palettes. For sprite making you'll only need 8bit though. Hey why not try out all 3 yourself ? They all can save as IFF so your work is portable between them.
Then there's animation support, I think DPaint is better but haven't used any of the programs extensively for that so you might be better with someone else's opinion on that one...

[Lando]

DPaint is the one everybody used for sprites back in the day.  Save it out as an IFF and then use kefren's IFF converter so save it out as a raw file so you can 'incbin' it in your code and set up the palette in your copperlist.  Try to have each sprite or frame ending on a 32bit boundary to make blitting easy.  I used to draw a 32x32 grid in Dpaint before starting on drawing the sprites then erase it before converting.

[J-Golden]

Thanks guys!
 
This is why I love this site, there are so many different people with talents in every field that help is always around the corner.  You all rock!
 
Thanks again!

[fishy_fiz]

Personally I use all 3 mentioned at different times. Brilliance is the quickest of the lot, and has a cool (for my tastes) feature where u can set both the color depth and the color precision. You can use (for a random example) 64 colors from a palette of 512 colors, which is good for megadrive gfx. PPaint is the only of the 3 that supports other image formats though if Im not mistaken. Dpaint probably has best animation of the 3, and has some other nice differences too (I know its limited, but I like the use of textures in Dpaint5).

For the most part I think its mostly a matter of personal tastes between the 3, but they do all have thier own advantages, so it's probably worth the effort to install all 3.

[stefcep2]

Briiliance does everything that DPaint did, right down to the keyboard short cuts.  It uses a "paintbox" interface instead of menus.  It feels faster to work with this way especially if working with more than 64 colors.  Problem is you then need to learn a new interfcae if you already know your way around Dpaint.

From my experience versions after Dpaint 4 AGA were slower for even basic operations and there wasn't a lot of new features that would be relevant for sprite design.  So I still use DPaint 4 AGA because I'm more familiar with Dpaints animation menus and functions.

[J-Golden]

@stefcep2:
 
Just to clarify, when you say Brilliance does everything DPaint V did right down to the keyboard shortcuts, does that also mean animation?

[stefcep2]

@stefcep2:
 
Just to clarify, when you say Brilliance does everything DPaint V did right down to the keyboard shortcuts, does that also mean animation?

I haven't found anything that Dpaint could do with animating that Brilliance couldn't.  They just use a different interface to achieve the same result.  brilliance also seems to load anims faster too.

And when working in interlaced modes, for some reason  there seems to be less interlace flicker, especially in NTSC high-res laced with Brilliance, probably because of the interface color scheme.

edit. regarding different image format support like jpegs and gif, PPAint has native support but i have a utility called datachrome that sits in the background and uses dtatypes to load jpegs and gifs transparently as IFF's into DPaint and Brilliance.

Like someone said try them all and see for yourself, altough PPAint has the weakest animation support, although it can save anims as anim-gifs.

[TheGoose]

Cool, subscribing...

[SamuraiCrow]

One thing that hasn't been mentioned here is that PPaint is free on the Aminet at http://aminet.net/package/biz/cloan/PPaint.

[J-Golden]

Ha ha, you all are great!  Thanks for all the pointers and suggestions!

I think I have narrowed it down to Deluxe (IV or V) and Brilliance and through a good friend have received copies of each to see which one I like better.  Once I get a good grasp of which one suits my needs and way of working best, I'll go hunt me down a real copy of the program.

Thanks again everyone!

+1s for everyone!!!!!!:)

OK, so that sounded a little gay.  I'm just so jazzed that so many people were willing to help out...:lol:

[Tension]

copy

GASP!! THE HORROR!!! :eek:

Won't someone think of the children!!!

[lsmart]

I've always heard Deluxe Paint was good, but I can only find ver III (3) on E-Bay right now.  Would IV (4) or V (5) be better or have tools that would make getting an earlier version a mistake?

If you only need OCS-Screenmodes Deluxe Paint III is IMO even better than Dpaint IV & V. I used it religiously in the 80s and 90s. Be sure to get the manual as well because it teaches all the essential tricks.

Damn I really loved using that program. Too bad it doesn´t run without emulation on AmigaOS 4. I´d pay $200 for a decent 64Bit Windows version of DPaint.

EDIT: I just tried "MyPaint" under Windows. Just like Gimp they didn´t even include a line-, rectangle- or circle-tool. Why? These are the most basic functions ever and they are useful when you want to draw guidance lines that help you positioning stuff. This is disappointing.