Importing BMP graphics

Many people would much rather create graphics in their favorite drawing program, and then import them. This can be done by saving images as 16-color BMP files (4-bit BMP). When you reduce your pictures to 16-color, you may be disappointed with the loss of quality, but this loss can be minimised if you are carefull.

• Carefully choose your colors. Avoid overuse of halftones, and half-greys. Your images will convert better if they have high color-saturation
• Make sure your drawing program is optimizing the palette. Avoid using Windows Paintbrush. It has the worst palette managing I have ever seen in any program.
• If you can, draw the picture in 16-colors to begin with, rather than drawing it with more colors and converting it.
• Make sure that all your frames use the same palette. Some drawing programs allow you to save and load palettes, but for other drawing programs, you may, for example, have to draw all 8 frames of your hero in one large picture, and then cut each one out and save it separately.

To import a BMP, press "I" while editing a sprite. You will be able to browse for BMP files.

Pick the one you want, and then choose what you want to do with the palette. You can press left and right to pick which slot the palette will be written into. If you have already imported a picture with the same palette, or if you are going to build a palette by hand, you can pick Import Without Palette

Now you have to choose the background color (transparent color). Move flashing cursor over any pixel of the color you want to make transparent, and press ENTER

Boom! You have your picture, ready to use.

The size of sprites are as follows:

  Heroes...........32x40
  Walkabout........20x20
  Portraits........50x50
  Small Enemies....34x34
  Large Enemies....50x50
  Huge Enemies.....80x80
  Attacks..........50x50
  Weapons..........24x24
  Box borders......16x16

A very common mistake is to save your BMP files with a color depth other than 16 color (4-bit color). If you save your files in the wrong color depth, they will show up dark grey in the import screen, and you will not be able to import them.

HOWTO Chapters

Keyboard Shortcuts | Getting Started | Making Maptiles | Making Walkabout Graphics | Importing BMP graphics | Moving on to Map Construction (Using Map Layers) | Making a Hero | Battles | How to use NPCs and Tags | Adding, Removing, Swapping, Heroes | Animating Maptiles | Vehicle Use | Stun, Regen, Poison, and Mute | Sound Effects | Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Text Boxes, But Were Afraid To Ask (Portrait Boxes) | Distributing a Game

Bosses | Making Complex Attacks | Combat Dialogues | Enemies that respond to a certain attack | Ways to refer to a hero in a script | Creating Dungeons | Permanent Stat-Boosters | Conditional Door Links | Creating Cutscenes | Using the Mouse in the Game | Making Android games