If you want to make tiles/textures i would recomend you using photoshop or painter....

Painter ain''t the one if you''re lookin'' for realistic textures/sprites. Sure you can create the sprites in Painter pixel by pixel, but Photoshop will give you 1000 times better tools for "photoquality" art.

BTW. I''m about to open my very own tutorial site according to Photoshop. It''s not workin'' yet, but you can check out some art work by me. Made with Photoshop 4.0.1...of course=)

http://www.ag.fimug.fi/~ilkka_jahnukainen/

Yeah, I have the exact same questions on creating graphics for a Final Fantasy 2 type of game. I have searched the net for tutorials on how to create sprites and tiles with no avail.

I have Photoshop and know how to use it, but I am totally clueless on how to create tile graphics for a game...I''d like to start making characters, but I don''t know how large to make them, how to make the area around them transparent...anything. So if you know of any "How To" tutorials or whatever, I''d be very grateful...I''m itching to do some character design to get me motivated to actually start programming the game...

Thanks!

Dude, okay I''m new at this game programmin business but I do know a few things about creating bitmap tiles, I hope this will help a bit(sorry, my first time on the site, didn''t have time to sign in yet.)

You may want to draw the bitmaps with some sort of conventions so they can be easily manipulated and load into your code. I suggest you make some kind of template, or something.

For example: Make a them all into cells. Like a 2*2,8*8,how ever big you may need, rectangles cells. Each cell can be 8*8, 16*16, 32*32 and so on. Then you save this template to a file. Next time you need to draw something, load it up. Draw, save it. This is like super cool when it comes to implementing, you can store all the character in a file, all the ships in a file, you get the idea.

Oh yeah, also when you make the cells keep this in mind. A 32*32 cell have to have a 34*34 cell enclosing them. With a 1 pixel thick wall. Did I do the math correctly? I don''t know, well just tweek around with it untill you get the desired result. Just be sure that the size of your bit-maps are powers of 2.

Peace Out, this is all I can say for now. It''s early in the moring and I''m too strung out to go on. But I hope this will help.

P.S to make your job easier get something like the Mappy32 editor.

In ddraw you can set a colorkey for transparency. If you set a source color key to black (0,0,0) then any black from your surface will not be blitted. So basically black is transparent if thats the color you wish to choose.