Spriting
|
|
Spriting is, according to the Internet's spriting community, the editing and creation of video game sprites as a form of art. These sprites are usually used in fangames or sprite comics, or are simply used as online avatars. There are also some people, sometimes young children, who are called a sprite thief, who claim various works of spriters as their own. The theft of intellectual property upsets the majority of the spriting community, but certain message boards and websites actually cater to and/or help these "thieves".
Custom spriting
Custom Spriting differs from ripping in that the sprites are the creation of the author. The sprites may be "edits" from existing sprites, or they may be made from scratch. Oftentimes these sprites are in the form of actual video game characters, whether from 3D games with no sprites, or merely new versions of an already 2D character. Sometimes, however, the spriters make their own characters, which may be anything from their own made up Pokemon to pixelated self portraits. Spriters may attempt to follow a particular style of sprites, or merely make their own style. Some popular styles to sprite in include the style of the Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga game, and some of the later Megaman games. Differences between styles include border style, size, shading, and types of colors used. The most commonly used program is Microsoft's MS Paint because of the distribution of the program. MS Paint is useful because of its simplicity and it is good for altering sprites pixel by pixel, but other programs such as Photoshop and The GIMP can be better tools for spriting. Since the custom sprites are the work of the artist, and they have often spent hours working on them, it is a good idea to give the artist credit for their work.
Sprite ripping
Sprite ripping is the term used for copying certain Sprites from a game and then pasting groups of sprites to a sprite sheet. People use emulators and Game ROMs to play the games, from which they try to copy every 'pose' of a sprite regardless of if is an object, character, or effect. They then paste the individual poses onto a large file (the "sheet") in a program such as MS Paint. This process, although commonly referred to as ripping, is actually the process of "capturing" sprites. Actual ripping involves going into the actual programming of the game and extracting the sprites directly from the binary code. This process is more difficult to learn, and fewer people know how to do it.
Once all the sprites have been pasted and organized on the sheet, spriters may add tags, messages or titles to make the sprite sheet look good and pose restrictions on their usage. Although they may ask you to E-mail or credit them on anything you do with the sprites, these may not be legitimate claims because they do not own the copyright and therefore didn't create the sprites. They did however, put effort into "ripping" them.
Sprite sheets are often first saved as .bmp files for MS Paint and other personal uses. They can then be saved into more compact .gif or .png formats to show to other users on the Internet or sent into sprite archives.