I apologize if this is an obvious question but I'm new to this system and am mostly blundering throught the dark. I made and imported a new sprite on microsoft paint. After much tweaking it looks okay and move okay but for some reason there's a giant white box around it that I can't figure out how to get rid of. I'm pretty sure its left over from paint and its probably and easy fix, but again how is beyond me. Could somebody be so kind as to clue me in? Thanks.

- evi

Yay. not only me who is using paint.

you could try to go into paint and change the color you want transparent to like green. that way, you can see how much white there is left over. make that green as well and save as bmp or png and import again. or post here and let us do it. sorry if you don't understand. my cells keyboard sucks.

You need to import the custom sprite files into your project from the editor, and NOT save them directly into the project folder. Open your project in the editor and at the top of the window is the resource manager - looks like three coloured blocks. Use that to import your sprites into the their associated file and another window will pop up asking you what colour is the transparent colour - the white background in your scenario. That will solve the ugly block around your sprites also...remember to save your sprites with a $ in the file name ($custom.png for example)

It isn't required to save your sprites with a $. I've never found this useful. I name mine Actor0 or Actor 00 depending on how many custom sprites I require for my game. You'll want to create a sprite sheet for multiple custom sprites. The easiest way is to export one of the sprite sheets, change the name to Actor0 (or whatever suits you) and add your sprites accordingly. Find one color (I use the ugly split pea color from paint) to use as your transparent color for your sprites and your tilesets, this will make it easy to keep everything together. Don't use white, as this will mess with the tiles that come with VX. For transparencies you will need to import every time.

I import custom tiles and sprites all of the time, its easy once you get the hang of it. Just make sure you're importing to the correct file. I had stupid issues with this at first. Sprites go in characters, enemies in battlers, tiles in system and so on and so forth.

Good luck. And stop by the introductions forum and present yourself. The best way to learn the game maker is through support. Stick around, let us know you're here.


EDIT:

I just learned that $ means that you can use a single sprite file, it tells the maker that it is a single file, as opposed to my stupid difficult way of making whole sprite sheets.

The $ is only necessary for creating spritesheets that only consist of a single character - it tells the game to only divide the sprite sheet into twelve frames; instead of first dividing it into eight separate characters with twelve frames apiece. That's not the problem here.

Like it was said, make sure you're actually using the proper importing function and that you set a transparent color.