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Hi all,

So I know this is a bit backwards, but I've decided to go from making 3D games to 2D for now, and because of this I've been looking for some decent sprite editing/animating software (because let's face it, using GIMP is just... well, not the easiest nor most efficient way of doing that), and most people on other forums recommend Promotion. I just wanted to know, has anyone else here actually used it? I'm downloading the demo now, it looks quite good, but is there perhaps something better that I haven't found yet?

Any input is appreciated!

Promotion made me write my own sprite editor.

Seriously, I've gone through so many of these programs, some of them are good for alpha, some of them are good for animation, some are good for palette management some of them are diabolical.

I made a sprite editor that just has 16 colours, then 8 shades of each of those colours, it supports 64x64 pixel sprites, doesn't scale - like if I need 32x32 sprites, I just use the extra space as scratch area, bits of sprite, legs, arms, whatever - and have the sprite assembled in the actual drawing area. It has a cool shading tool (left click to darken, right click to lighten), automatic outlining, arrow keys to move between frames, onion skin frame, line and fill tools. I tend to draw a black outline, fill in colour, then shade - tends to be quite a fast workflow.
Anyway, if you are using 64x64, 32x32, or 16x16 then I'd be happy to fire a copy to you. If your using one of those sizes and want to use a fixed colour palette, if your sprites want to look a bit retro and you'd rather that wasn't a pain in the butt, then I think you'd like my editor.
I'm using it for all the sprites in mine and Cliff's AppGameKit dungeon crawler - I'd dread to use anything else now. I think animation is the main thing - it simply lets you set the start and end frame, and shows the animation in it's own little section. But just being able to onion skin, and move between frames easily makes a big difference.
It can't import anything, just exports PNG and subimage text files, and uses it's own format for saving/loading - due to the way it handles the limited palette. But it is what it is - it might save you a bunch of time and stress, or you might not see the point in it .

I'd love to see your editor! I'm willing to try anything right now!

After playing with Pro Motion 6 for a while, the only advantages to it that I see aren't really that great. Honestly, I did better with GIMP, because I could easily make things tileable with one click. With PM6, I can't find such a function. The animation part looks great, though!

However, I'm still going to give it a shot, because some of the things are really simple to do with PM6 over GIMP, and the way you can save and edit brushes? Pretty easy to do!