Eidersoft
£39.95
From Eidersoft comes a program which assumes that the programmer
who's interested in creating sprites is also an incredibly talented
artist with the mouse!
The lack of drawing tools needed to create the
sprite's design is shocking for a program selling for £39.95,
especially after programs such as the original Degas and Neochrome
have been using the technology for over two years. The drawing
screen is a 32 x 22 grid representation of magnified pixels
resembling boxes, which are similar in appearance to Degas' zoom
option screen. To create a new sprite one must choose a colour, move
the cursor onto one of the boxes in the grid and click. The box
changes to that colour. It's good for minor touch-ups but to create
a quality and precise sprite image it's grossly inadequate and
fairly time-consuming. Once the sprite is created however,
manipulating it is fairly straight-forward.
The sprites are moved by the principles of frame
by frame animation. For example, if you wanted the sprite of a
little girl jumping and waving her arms, you would first draw the
image of the little girl on the screen as you'd want her to appear
in the very beginning of the sprite. This still image would be
called frame one. You would then click on the control box near the
side of the screen to advance to frame two. Using the frame copy
option will duplicate frame one's image onto frame two. Now you
merely change frame two by slightly altering the position of the
girl. The entire process is repeated over and over, frame by frame,
until the illusion of motion is created when all the frames are
played one after the other.
In order to achieve a fluid motion, Pro Sprite
Designer also requires several frames per second to be drawn. Try to
imagine the long tedious work in producing a sprite of several
seconds or even a minute long! The space ship sample given with the
disk is made up of 46 sprites but using this program, I can't
imagine it taking less than several hours to produce. If you're
willing to spend the time creating the sprites, you can play them
forward or reverse, reposition them on the screen, change the order
of the frames, alter the speed and the timing between frames, or
even edit and delete specific frames.
The save and load options allow you to use another
program on the disk to incorporate your sprites in ST Basic, Fast
Basic, Assembler or C programs.
So far, there isn't an abundant choice of sprite
creation programs on the market for the Atari ST and if you need a
sprite kit, this will do the job creating quality sprites provided
you are willing to use the primitive, time-consuming, tools of the
program. Coming soon however is a graphics package from Rainbird
Software and it might be best to wait before making the decision of
which package to buy.
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