Sprite MapMaker

Sprite MapMaker is a tool to arrange all your sprites in one picture and supply you with a Visual Basic file to include in your project so that you easy can access your sprites. MapMaker is a old tool that I made in 1998 but I still use the same version.

1. Easy to arrange all your sprites in to one picture.

2. If you have only one picture with your graphics then you can open the picture in a image editing program like Paint Shop Pro or Photoshop and convert the picture to for example 256 color and the bonus of this is that all the sprites now have the same color palette and we avoid all color problems if the use runs windows in low color resolution.

3. When you have added all your sprites and saves the project MapMaker produces a VB code module for you to include in your one VB project. This code module includes a function to load all sprite data
in to an array. Now you can access your sprites in a easy way. You have Index, X, Y, Width and Height of all your sprites in the picture.

4. MapMaker saves a MapMaker project file to your picture. This lets you reopen a picture and add more sprites to it. Because a game project often starts with a few sprites and when you have a working game you probably wants to add more sprites.

5. MapMaker also saves a sprite mask picture in black and white. If you don't uses the Blitter Object (Bob) control in the SineMaker package to blit masked sprites (transparent around the sprite). Then you can use the mask picture to manually blit sprites with GDI api calls like BitBlt or VBs PaintPicture.