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:

• Sprites are composed by layers and frames. These two concept are separated. You have layers in one side and frames on the other side. You can imagine this as a matrix, where each row is a layer and each column is a frame.
• Supported color modes: RGBA, Grayscale and Indexed images (palettes up to 256 colors).
• Supported image formats (load/save): PNG, GIF, JPG, FLC, FLI, BMP, PCX, TGA, and ASE (special format).
• Load and save animations in a sequence of bitmaps (e.g. frame1.png, frame2.png, etc.).
• Tiled drawing mode, useful to draw patterns and textures.
• Undo/Redo for every operation.
• Special tools like Blur, Jumble, Convolution Matrices.
• Multiple editors support. You can split an editor horizontally or vertically multiple times to edit and view the same sprite with different zooms, or different sprites.
• Onion skinning.

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/skins/*.*        ASE skins
data/widgets/*.xml    XML files with dialogs

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

To compile ASE you have to configure what libraries are available, release-debug-profile mode, etc. On Linux or Mac OS X, you can run the "fix.sh" script, answer the questions and done: the main "makefile" is created, then you can run "make". E.g.

bash fix.sh
make

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

make -f makefile.linux

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

make -f makefile.mingw

With Visual C++, you need GNU make for Windows to run the following command:

make -f makefile.vc

Next versions of ASE will use CMake as build system. Sorry for this inconvenient.

Note (MinGW and VC++): There are big chances to get link problems because the Allegro library is not found. It is because there are a lot of Allegro versions out there and each one with different ways to name the library. If this is your case, you will need to modify makefile.mingw or makefile.vc files by hand.

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:

• Bugs
• Request features
• Patches
• Support request

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

• ASE is distributed under GPL license.
• Jinete and Vaca are under BSD license.
• Allegro is giftware license (similar to MIT license).
• ALFONT is under LGPL license.
• quantize.c is copyright by Ben Davis (you need his authorization to use his code in your own program).
• quantize2.c is distributed under the MIT license
• Lua-5.0 is distributed under the MIT license
• GIMP is distributed under GPL license
• GLib and GTK+ are distributed under LGPL license.
• GFLI-1.3 is distributed under GPL license.
• Libart 2.3.3 is distributed under LGPL license.
• Libintl is distributed under LGPL license.
• The FreeType Project is distributed under FTL license.
• zlib & Libpng are under the ZLIB license.

AUTHORS

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

THANKFULNESS

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