I have the files ready, but what application can I edit these sprites with? Is Gimp an application I can use to edit the copied files or is there another app that is used specific to making sprites?
I've personally just been using photoshop cs6 but someone who helps me with one of my mods just use mspaint and does a really great job at it.
The problem with that is MSPaint won't export any files as transparent; not as far as I know, anyways. Paint.NET is a good alternative; you can make images transparent, and even have multiple layers! BUT to save it as a .png, you'll hafta make sure there's only one layer, and you can collapse layers into one another.
ya the white background, that's always the problem but magic wand is there for a reason also couldn't you just save as a png?
You can save as .png, but not if you have multiple layers; .png files are unable to support having multiple layers, meaning you'll hafta collapse them into one when you're ready to save and use it.
welp that's one more reason why i love my some photoshop, when i need to get my png to a ping i just save as a png an i get to keep my psd...
I personally use GIMP for all my sprite editing (as well as any texture creation or edits I do for other games as well). Paint.net is a semi-decent alternative to GIMP (on a list of "freeware"), but I find it to be a bit too... "clunky" for my tastes. It also has ZILLIONS less features than GIMP, and GIMP will also run custom user-made plugins soo... n.nU Adobe recently released Photoshop CS2 as "freeware", though, so you could also try that. It's a VERY large program though in terms of file size compared to GIMP, though! :] Also, what people have said above is very true: MSPaint (aka "Paint") does NOT do transparency layers. It will even strip them out of an imported image that already has them, and there really isn't a circumstance where it could be considered a good tool for sprite creation/editing lol...
I know someone who also uses MS Paint. He doesn't personally make starbound mods, but he and I have worked quite a bit together. Dose some damn good work too.
I didn't say the program was "nonfunctional", just that there really aren't any circumstances where MSPaint could be used for making game sprites. I mean, even if you were gonna make something for like, a 16-bit ROM Hack (where a solid color is used as the "transparency layer"), you couldn't use it anyways, since it doesn't let you create an indexed color palette...
