Any plugins to improve the Sprite Editor?

[JapanGamer29]

I'm finding the Sprite Editor really lacking. The palette's too small, e.g, there aren't enough variations of brown, and the brush sizes are 1, 3, 5, 7 and 15 which makes it difficult to use the "snap-to-grid" feature on sprites that are 32 or 64 pixels.

Are there plug-ins or something to improve this, or are we expected to use a separate program for editing sprites?

I'm still very new to this.

[Mad Alex]

I use gimp 2.8 sometimes, but the gamemaker pixel art is usally good for me.
https://www.gimp.org/downloads/
I have used blender to make a 3d game that turned out horrible.

[sylvain_ch21]

for brush you can make your own brushes via the 5 dynamic brush slots

for example (use the white color, cause if you use another, it can be incovenient, cause color of the brush ?multiply? with the color you select in the palette ), with the 1px brush draw a 2x2px
with the select tool select those 2x2; CTRL+C -> et voilà (you now have a 2x2 brush available)

advise: create a png sprite with all your favorite brushes. then you just import it in your projecct , so you can easily select and copy them to the dynamic brush slots.



color palette -> just left clic on the color in use (left or right of the mouse icon to show which color is used for left and richt clic) -> you go to a full ?16M? color selector (RGB, HSL, hexadecimal)
you can also double clic on any slot of the palette to customise its color.

also you can import palette (the small menu icon on the top-right of the palette) from one sprite to another (take car to not overwrite a palette you just fully customise before you saved/export that asset outside so you can easly reimport it into any of your projects ;) )

advice: import some png containing your favorite template palette as sprite. If you want then to build a palette from it. its a bit tedious cause you'll have to do it manually (no function to auto import the color in the sprite into its palette :( )

the image editor is very simple, but it has some interesting features, just learn the few tricks that help to exploit it at best. :)
of course it doesn't compete with full dedicated image editor like photoshop, gimp, krita, etc...

[JapanGamer29]

@sylvain_ch21 Thank you! Those are excellent solutions. I can't believe I didn't realize you could make custom brushes or open a full palette.

[NGMZeroX]

If you are working on complex art that you might be using for a long while. I advice avoiding the GMS sprite editor ... even the sword example trailer they showed looked painful to create. there is many free/open source tools out there that not only better, but will also add to your skills with another program. try searching for Gimp, Paint.Net or Krita.

I might also just be saying that because i never got used to the aprite editor.