The video game development company I work for has some kind of Windows-only application for sprites. Because I do my work on a Mac, and all my office buddies stopped doing sprites, I don't know what it is and how it works. Anyone has an idea? By the way, I was asked to change my sprite transparent backgrounds to magenta 256... what the hell that means?

Sprite Animation has more of less disappeared from the main stream. You can find some infomation on it at http://www.xicons.com as well as a search of versiontracker.com for sprites should yeild some results. Good Luck

There are the very beginnings of a new program talked about and designed here:
http://www.idevgames.com/forum/showthrea...ge=1&pp=15
but that's a ways off.

There is also pixen, which has some problems, in my estimation, but might be just what you need:
http://www.opensword.org/Pixen/

They also might have some good ideas for places to get information there.

I'm guessing that magenta 256 is probably Red and Blue maxed out and Green down to 0. They may be talking about using a 256 color palette, however (like with a gif) and making the last color have the magenta in it.

If you are asking for the windows app they are using. Well, there are a bunch, mostly old. Try googling "sprite editor"

Honestly, I don't think you'll need a "special" program at all. You'll just need to build it up using any image editing program and output it to the format they specify. (For instance, using a certain color for transparent, saving as a .bmp or something.)

Yeah, bright gaudy magenta is a sort a standard for the 'transparent' colour in sprite animation. Any pixel with that colour is considered transparent and is not drawn.

Photoshop will work just fine for this work; do everything in 24 bit colour, switch to indexed (windows 8-bit is probably the best palette considering your environment) colour as the very last step, and then floodfill in the magenta as your background.

Thanks for the info and the tips guys. Unfortunately, I won't use them because I left the project. The schedule given to me was unrealistic - too much work in too little time. It's disappointing because I was the lead artist (actually, the only artist) and my employer was a high profile video game developer. Oh well...