An automatic "sprite sheet boxer" idea I had...

[Numbuh 214]

I'm not going to lie here; a lot of gamers use Sonic Worlds as the engine for their fangames (and a Clickteam product with a "2" in the name as a result). The trouble is: not everyone wants to use the default Sonic sprites for their fangames, but even fewer people want to go through the trouble of importing an entire sprite sheet into Multimedia Fusion 2. What I am suggesting we do is make some sort of program that takes a sprite sheet image and does the following things to it:

• replaces all pure black pixels with "MMF2 Black" (8, 0, 0), since MMF2's default transparent color is pure black.
  
• replaces the pre-defined "transparent" color with pure black, also because MMF2's default transparent color is pure black.
  
• creates rectangles around every sprite in a pre-determined "box" color.
  

I know the first two are easily do-able, but I honestly don't know how we would do the latter; I do know, however, that this would greatly simplify the process of adding new player sprites into the Sonic Worlds engine. If someone could figure this out, it would help a majority of Sonic fans wanting to get their game ideas off the ground (and perhaps get Knuckles into official builds that much faster).

[LarkSS]

MMF2 actually supports box import, in which it recognizes boxes and imports several sprites from different boxes in a single image. You can even set certain pixel that represent hotspots and action points that MMF2 automatically detects.

Here's an example of box sprites I did for Kain's Sonic CG sprite:

http://larkss.thisisourcorner.net/files/Sonic_cG.zip

I don't remember exactly which side of the green pixel indicates what, but two sides of where the green pixel is located relates to the hotspot, and the other two sides of the box that the green pixel is at relates to the action point.

Another thing I should mention is that since MMF2, even though there is a default transparent color, it is not necessary as you can select the transparent color when importing. I guess keeping with the default could simplify a step though.

So anyway, color swapping shouldn't be a big deal, and if the sprites are packaged into boxes in the way I gave a link to above that MMF2 can interpret, the importing task could be simplified by a mile. Also, since MMF2 doesn't optimize power-of-2 sprites and the smallest canvas size is best, setting the hotspots of sprites using the boxes would enable users to quickly crop down ( if not fully cropped already ) and condense sprites while keeping positioning correct.

[Asuma]

That's how the hotspot are set? I never knew you had to make a "cross".=/

[ila]

Right MMF does support box import, but Numbuh214 wants a way to automatically convert sheets into boxes, which I think sounds incredibly tricky and I have no clue how we'd go about that.

[Asuma]

Nah, that's easy, sort of. Basically, you have to get a even tiled sheet and use a program to cut them in to separate images. I believe Photoshop can do it using a it's slice tool.

http://scratch.mit.edu/forums/viewtopic.php?pid=233749