If you are here and you haven’t seen Mark Ferrari’s GDC talk, you really should sit down and watch it. He is perhaps the greatest pallete animator of all time. Even if you aren’t familiar with the games he worked on, HN folks have likely seen his gallery of single-image animations linked below.
The second link you posted leads to a 404 for me. By going to the main website I found a link to a page that seems to be the same thing, though maybe it's reformatted a bit. Here's the link:
Surprised to see GrafX2 in front page, since it was out for ages and it's quite niche. Anyway, I'm very happy for it since it is my favourite pixel drawing tool. It surpasses deluxe paint capabilities by far, and its usability aimed to power users is unmatched. Long life GrafX2.
By the way, the lack of credit in the cover image hurts me deeply. It is made by Ilija Melentijevic (@iLkKke on twitter). One of the best pixel artists outthere!
> By the way, the lack of credit in the cover image hurts me deeply. It is made by Ilija Melentijevic (@iLkKke on twitter). One of the best pixel artists outthere!
Are you sure that cover image lack of credit? Try look on it under the scope, especially in the left lower corner of it -- and you will see iLkKke sign! ;-)
I trialed several different pixel art tools and really like Aseprite so I purchased a license for the full edition.
I was asking more of a feature comparison of why one would be better in terms of actually creating pixel art and animations, not a licensing and memory consumption comparison.
That's the second time I've heard Autodesk accused of the "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" tactic in a week (albeit implicitly in this case). Is it something they are know to do?
I remember when after years of dabbling with Deluxe Paint IV on the Amiga I first used professional graphics software like Photoshop or Corel Draw and was utterly confused why everything seemed to be so needlessly complex with these tools: “Why can’t I even draw a simple line or rectangle?”
Very different use cases and target audiences for sure. Still, from my point of view it wasn’t until Pixelmator that some of that simplicity was brought back.
I'm glad it got a new homepage. But these days I use Aseprite for my pixel work. It's still got a pixel art interface, but much more optimized for the artist. Take a look if you are a pixel artist.
What are your projects for the nearest future?
Go home and eat (it's 19:00)!
Attend to LTP3.
Make a Multi-player Tetris game.
Release a new version of GrafX2 (who said "nearest furture"? :)).
This program has a great feature that I haven't seen in any other FLOSS drawing program: both right and left mouse buttons draw, and you can assign a different color to each. This is a huge productivity improvement compared to drawing with only one button, especially for pixel art.
If the middle button would center the zoomed view on the selected pixel, instead of toggling the view (a much too rare operation to deserve its own mouse button), it would be perfect.
Like many others here, I have so many brilliant memories of playing with DPaint - first on Amiga then PC. I seem to remember writing a loader for 'lbm' files so we could use the output directly in projects.
Another similar and equally amazing package was Autodesk Animator Pro - similar fond memories of using it and being blown away by how easy it was for me as an artistic klutz to create pretty pictures. There is a page with links to original source code, binaries, blog posts etc. here: http://animatorpro.org/
Plenty of pixel based options that are actually quite nice, but the brilliance of Claris/MacDraw was its vector focus with a straightforward and powerful integration of interface and features.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMcJ1Jvtef0
http://www.effectgames.com/effect/article.psp.html/joe/Old_S...