Okay, everybody knows about the horribly pixelly mess that occurs when you try to rotate an active object by an angle that's not divisible by 90 degrees, right? So, are there any legally free graphics programs that can properly create rotated versions of a sprite?
"Omg. Where did they get the idea to not use army guys? Are they taking drugs?" --Tim Schafer on originality in videogames
Yeah but you'd still get the horrible pixelly mess. I think what Noyb means is some kind of filtering when rotating, like what you'd get on Photoshop? You could always try using the trial versions of Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro, there isn't any free programs like that that I know of, I just always used Photoshop.
I think, without money, you're just going to have to learn to like it. Sorry man .
I know when you use a powerfull graphics editor, it doesn't get all messy because it adds anti-aliasing, although I do suppose if you turned the function off, it might come out a bit better than mmf/tgf's picture editor.
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Without filtering or interpolation, you're always gonna get pixels going astray when rotating, but with the active picture object, you can rotate in 360 degrees so it's less noticable.
I'm not 100% sure if it will let you rotate images, but it most likely will. I've been hearing very good things about this program, a friend told me that it is almost as powerful as Photoshop. Oh, and for those who do not know what GNU often means... this program is completely free.
I've written some code that can do pixel replication, bilinear and bicubic (I'm not sure how much better quality this would give than bilinear (if any) but it was easy to implement) rotation.
Edit: Here's a very simple example of it (doesn't show bicubic because it wasn't implemented when i did the picture). www.clicksplat.com/Image1.jpg
Erik, you should make an extension which does it... I'd love to be able to rotate sprites without having to pre-store the animations, and without having to use an alpha channel.
The higher quality your rotate, the slower it will run (at runtime).
But it would be nice for the animation editor in MMF to have a built in high quality rotater for edit time rotating.
I'd rather not make an extension, I'm not too familar with the MMF extension SDK (but if someone else wants to then I can give them the source, it's not in C++ though). What's wrong with using the Alpha Channel object though?