Being an artist, I *swear* by Paintshop Pro 8: its geared more towards pixel art than Photoshop and the whole interface is heavily customiseable. Plus, of course, its much cheaper than Photoshop.

I use Corel Photopaint 11 now. The first Corel I used was 4, and since then I just keep using it. Does everything I want, no need for me to change to something else. But I admit, there are certainly "better" programs for pixelart.

Grue is right, Maped2's tile editing needs its praises sung from the rooftops. But as I've said before, Cloanto Software's PPaint for Amiga is the best programme I've ever used for doing pretty much anything pixelly in 256 colours. It's the best thing to come out of Italy since Gianfranco Zola, and is five times as versatile.

GIMP is awesome. No really.

The last time I tried gimp, maybe two years ago, it wasn't exactly stable on windows. And I find all the windows confusing.
It's easy to confuse me...

I use Photoshop 6. I'll probably never bother to upgrade. It works great as it is, and it's just too expensive to buy another Photoshop. The tool I make the most heavy use of, besides the pencil tool set to 1-pixel size, is probably the pen tool (called "bezier" in some other programs). I primarily use this tool to draw clean lines over pencil lines I have scanned in. The "add noise" tool is also very helpful to give an object the randomosity that real objects tend to have, but which is hard to recreate intentionally by hand.

Sometimes I use my Wacom tablet with it, but the tablet is annoying because it has about a 33% chance of uninstalling itself each time I start up the computer. It's from the days of Windows 95, and I think it disagrees with XP to some extent.

I also used to use POV-Ray to do 3D-rendered images. I haven't in a while because it far too time intensive for most purposes, but if the right reason comes up, I may yet use it again.

For modmaking, I use ModPlug Tracker. I don't have a very big library of samples files, unfortunately. I ripped most of them from other mods. I think I have been steadily improving at my modmaking abilities, at least as far as composing goes. I don't really delve much into the weird effects.

Regular sound effects are a much bigger problem. Sometimes I actually use ModPlug to try and cut wave files up, and play them in a certain sequence as a .s3m to simulate some other sound. Then I have modplug save as wave.

GIMP two rules yoo

Haha, this thread is excellent.

I will start just like Rysen. For art I use PSP4. But I really really suck at art. So I used PSP4 when I had to make sprites for Leo the Merman. But I was an artist just that one time, and PSP4 is cool. Photoshop is much much better. Okay I am done!

I, like Rysen, do a lot more with music than I have ever done with art. I have been tracking for about 4 or 5 years now, and I have used and always will use ModPlug. It is the most intuitive interface for new trackers, and they have really developed it up and given it some great features for more experienced trackers. I do pretty much everything in MPT when I have mod-only projects, like Rysen was saying. Most people are impressed by the quality of the samples I use, but they are really easy to find (many of them were taken from mods I got from modplug.com). Trust me, after 4 years, you get really goddamn picky about your samples, and you get the best you can find in your massive mod library (also easily developed after four years).

MPT used to be my entire studio, but I have recently branched out into some more stuff. I use Renoise (not for tracking, I really can't stand it's tracking interface) for adding effects, mostly just reverb, and rendering to wav. CDEX is a great free program that I use to make oggs or mp3s out of my wavs. Oh, and also oggmod, which I was so graciously linked to by the mighty Toen. It is an incredible program that converts your xms into oxms by compressing your samples into ogg. And it kicks ass. You can seriously reduce your filesizes, and even better, it is only playable by FMOD (which means it is basically only playable by VERGE), so its like a secret format and people can't go in and mess with your mods. Or something. So that pretty much covers it. Oh, and all this stuff I got for free (although some of it maybe I shouldn't have...), so this is for people that don't have a lot of room, or don't have a lot of money. If you have a lot of both of those things, then you can get an awesome set-up like Rysen's.

Also, becuase sound effects were mentioned, I thought I would talk about those also. I have never done sound effects before, but I had to do them for this compo, and they are really fun. Sadly, my studio amounts to the crappy mic that came with my computer, sound recorder, ModPlug, and Renoise. I need to get cool edit and some other stuff, but for now I just make sounds with my voice and layer them together and whatnot. Also I have Morrowind, and that game has some great sounds, a few of which I ripped. I don't like ripping anything though, so most of them I modified in some way. OK, thats it for the technical side of things.

As far as theory, I have always divided trackers/composers into two groups. Musicians, and non-musicians. Being a musician (as in, playing an instrument) is not a prerequisite for making music on a computer, BUT it is definately a huge help. Its kind of difficult to give examples without offending anyone, but I will say that Rysen is definately someone I consider to be a musician. It is mostly evident in the coherency of composition, although there are many other indicators. But one thing is definately certain, listening to music is the most important thing you can do to aid your composing. It is fairly accurate to say that I "pull my melodies out of my ass", but really I am just using my knowledge of all the music I have listened to to compile a melody that sounds good. It's a bit difficult to explain, but the best way I can say it is that my music just takes an idea and follows it to its logical conclusion. I just listen to the song, and track what comes into my head next. I really don't think there is much you can do as far as teaching or learning that skill, although I am sure you can emulate it by learning as much theory as possible. Now, I'm not saying that I'm some sort of tracking god, far from it, I am just stating how I work. I'm sure there are better methods. But I think of myself as not really having any knowledge of theory, I just have instinct and experience. In my opinion, if you want to do music for a living, you've got to have both of those. If you want to track music for your VERGE games, you don't really need a damn thing except modplug and GM.DLS (shudder). So there is a very long explanation of a very simple question.

-Troupe

Quote:Originally posted by Troupe

But one thing is definately certain, listening to music is the most important thing you can do to aid your composing.
Talking as your definition of "musician", I'd say there's a more important thing than just listening to music to aid composing: Seeing it and hearing it and playing it yourself.
I can't track to save my life, but I consider myself a reasonably adequate guitar player and have co-written a few songs for my band in my time. Reading music theory from a book helped me pretty much zero with this. But reading and playing various songbooks (like the outstanding "The Beatles Complete: Guitar and Vocal Edition" and the more recent Oasis equivalent), showed me things that I actually needed to know, like how songs are structured, which chords sound good together, and that drummers should never be permitted to write songs. Theory should come second to this. Theory is both boring and unnecessary at least at the beginning, no matter what music teachers say. Being taught how to play an instrument by someone who's getting paid to do so is a bad idea, and had my piano teacher actually showed me how to play some tunes instead of snowing me under with theory when I was ten, I'd probably have stuck with it and be able to play piano today. Teaching yourself to play an instrument is cheaper, easier and less stressful all round. Er, I'm getting off topic. What was I saying? Oh yeah:

RINGO STARRR SUX!222

I'll probably give tracking another go at some point in the future, but I don't think I could ever actually compose on a computer. I'll stick with my guitar for that.

Anyway, that's what I think about composition. Feel free to disagree and call me an idiot.

Quote:Originally posted by rpgking


I disagree. Photoshop is used a lot in "starting something from scratch". A lot of professional game development studios use this program extensively for texture art. But it can easily be adapted for pixel art. Photoshop has all the same capabilities as PSP, but with much more sophisticated tools...

yes thats true, but I think that photoshop has lots of tools you don't need when doing pixel art. Plus photoshop takes time to learn, were as PSP you can pick up and start doing some pixel art right away. But this is really personal choice. I started with PSP before I ever used phtoshop so I like PSP more.

Yes, for textures though, it is alot easier to do in photoshop. =)