ASE | Allegro Sprite Editor
Copyright © 2001-2010 David Capello
THIS PROGRAM IS DISTRIBUTED WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY
See license section for more information.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction
Features
Configuration Files
Developers
Compilation
Installation
Uninstallation
Source Code
Design
Contact Information
License
Legal Issues
Authors
Thankfulness

INTRODUCTION

ASE is an open source program to create animated sprites. Sprites are little images that can be used in your website or in a video game. You can draw characters with movement, intros, textures, patterns, backgrounds, logos, color palettes, isometric levels, etc.

What makes ASE different? It focuses on pixel editing, to do pixel-art. Indeed, it isn't a photo retouching tool or a vector graphics editor. Mainly it is a tool to create tiny animations pixel-by-pixel.

FEATURES

The biggest features of ASE are:

CONFIGURATION FILES

In Windows 98/2K/XP/Vista the main configuration file is aseprite.ini which is saved in the same folder of aseprite.exe executable file (in this way ASE is a portable application, i.e. you can transport a copy of the program in your USB drive).

The following is a list of all configuration files that you could modify (it is not recommended to do so, but is useful if you want to super-customize ASE):

aseprite.ini          Program configuration
data/gui.xml          Menus, shortcuts, and tools
data/convmatr.def     Convolutions matrices
data/fonts/*.pcx      Fonts to be used in the GUI
data/jids/*.jid       XML files with dialogs
data/skins/*.*        ASE skins

In GNU/Linux, the configuration file is ~/.asepriterc, and the data/ files are searched in these locations (in priority order):

$HOME/.aseprite/
/usr/local/share/aseprite/
data/

DEVELOPERS

COMPILATION

Before compile, you have to configure how to compile ASE, what libraries are available, release-debug-profile mode, etc. You can run the "fix.sh" script, answer some questions and done: the main makefile is created, just do

make

Or you could edit the "makefile.cfg", uncomment CONFIGURED=1 and uncomment the necessary options, and then run

makefile -f makefile.lnx

For MinGW, edit the "makefile.cfg" file, and then

makefile -f makefile.mgw

INSTALLATION

After compilation, you have two options:

  1. Running ASE from its source directory.

  2. Install ASE in the directory that you specified in the "fix.sh" question: "Where do you want install ASE by default?" (generally "/usr/local") (in the "makefile.cfg", it's the DEFAULT_PREFIX variable)

    Run "make install" (it only works in Unix like systems)

UNINSTALLATION

Run "make uninstall".

SOURCE CODE

If you downloaded ASE from Git repository, after updating I recommend you to do:

~/aseprite-src/$ make clean
~/aseprite-src/$ ./fix.sh
~/aseprite-src/$ make

Also, you can make dependencies of the files (if you are trying to modify ASE source code):

~/aseprite-src/$ sh misc/deps.sh

DESIGN

I started ASE development about 10 years ago. It was originally programmed in C language. Recently I changed it to C++ and started to refactor some code. Anyway there are big parts of source code which does not follow "good design" practices, and maybe those parts will stay just like they are for a long time.

Refactoring code to improve the design of the application is something I love to do, but users do not appreciate it so much. "New features" and "fixing bugs" are the main goal, then refactoring (and avoid incorporating new bugs) should be second priority.

CONTACT INFORMATION

We recommend you to use the SourceForge tracker to do specific reporting of issues:

For more information, visit the official page of the project:

http://www.aseprite.org/

LICENSE

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA

LEGAL ISSUES

AUTHORS

David Capello <davidcapello@gmail.com>
Programmer, designer, and maintainer.
Ilija Melentijevic
New GUI skin (from ASE 0.8). A lot of good ideas for ASE 0.8. http://ilkke.blogspot.com/ http://www.pixeljoint.com/p/9270.htm
Trent Gamblin
Mac OS X packager.

Thanks for ideas, patches, bugs report and contributions to:

Alex Winter, Álvaro "Kronoman X" González, Angelo Mottola, Ben "entheh" Davis, Carl Olsson, Christer Sandberg, Clayton Enga, David Campo, Elias "networm" Pschernig, Elio Cuevas Gómez, Emmanuel "God_Cells" Rousseau, Hernán Echegoyemberry, Ilija "iLKke" Melentijevic, Jon "kazzmir" Rafkind, Jonathan Taylor, Jorge Ramírez Flores, Juraj Michalek, Manuel De Miguel Moreno, Manuel "manuq" Quiñones, Mateusz Czaplinski, Nathan "whitedoor" Smith, Nora Amendez, Peter "tjaden" Wang, Philippe Michael Groarke, Robert "Bob" J Ohannessian, Scott Wilson, Trent "trentg" Gamblin.

THANKFULNESS

Some people didn't contribute to the project in a direct way, but their work was indispensable to make it real:

Álvaro González
For the other routine to generate optimized palettes (used in old versions of ASE).
Angelo Mottola
For the routines to load/save JPEG files with JPGalleg (alternative use instead of libjpeg).
Ben Davis
For his optimized palette generation routine.
Billy Biggs and Lauris Kaplinski
For the help with the alpha blending routines.
Csaba Biegl
For his ellipse routine in the GRX library (used in old versions of ASE).
David Turner, Robert Wilhelm, and Werner Lemberg
For the FreeType project. http://www.freetype.org/
Derek Liauw Kie Fa and Robert J Ohannessian
for 2xSaI.
DJ Delorie
For the DJGPP port to DOS of the GNU software. http://www.delorie.com/djgpp/
Elias Pschernig
For his excelent bresenham ellipse algorithm and to report some nasty keyboard bugs. And his patch to load/save GIF files.
Elver Loho
For port ASE to BeOS.
Frank J. T. Wojcik, Guy Eric Schalnat, Andreas Dilger, Glenn Randers-Pehrson
For libpng.
Gary Oberbrunner
For his code to quantize RGB images with ordered dither method.
Javier Gonzalez
For his AllegroFont wrapper.
Jean-loup Gailly and Mark Adler
For zlib
Jens Ch. Restemeier
For GFLI, his code to save FLI files is just "amazing".
Jerry Coffin and HenkJan Wolthuis
For the hash table routines.
Johan Halmén and Anders "Trezker" Andersson
for mapgen (included in old ASE versions). http://edu.loviisa.fi/~lg/jh/mapgen/ http://www.angelfire.com/art/dumlesoft/Projects.html
Jordan Russell and Martijn Laan
For Inno Setup. http://www.innosetup.com/
Jose Luis Torres Pantoja
For his gift, the book "Digital Image Processing, Gonzalez and Woods, Addison-Wesley, 2002"
Juraj Michalek
For the support to ASE in his portal. http://games.linux.sk/
Lee Thomason
For tinyxml library. http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/tinyxml
Matthieu Haller and Kirsten Schulz
For filled polygon algorithm of GD library. http://www.libgd.org/
Matthew Leverton
For his Allegro portal. http://www.allegro.cc/
Max Maischein
For the documents about various file formats of the Animator and Animator Pro.
Mike Haaland
For his documentation about the FLI/FLC, COL, PIC, and MSK files format.
Paúl Andrés "Ceniza" Jiménez
For his help in the translation of FULL-SCREEN.txt document.
Peter Wang
For his Red Pixel II game, it was very helpful for the scripting routines. Also for loadpng library. http://redpixel.sourceforge.net/ http://tjaden.strangesoft.net/
Raph Levien
For his excelent work with the libart library. http://www.levien.com/divbart/
Richard M. Stallman
For the Free Software Foundation, GNU and Emacs, and everyone who contributed with free software. http://www.fsf.org/ http://www.gnu.org/ http://www.emacs.org/
Robert Höhne
For the RHIDE enviroment. http://www.lanet.lv/~pavenis/rhide.html
Salvador Eduardo Tropea
For the SETEdit editor (although I don't use it anymore, the first months in Linux without it would have been impossibles) http://setedit.sourceforge.net/
Shawn Hargreaves
And hundreds of people who helped in the Allegro library. http://alleg.sourceforge.net/
Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis
And a lot of people who contributed with The GIMP and GTK+. I personally "borrow" source code for differents task in the program. http://www.gimp.org/ http://www.gtk.org/
The Independent JPEG Group
For the JPEG library to load/save Jpeg files. ftp://ftp.uu.net/graphics/jpeg/
The Open Group
For XFree86. http://www.x.org/
Waldemar Celes, Roberto Ierusalimschy, and Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo
For their excelent work with Lua. http://www.lua.org/