Aligning new trains

[Hyronymus]

I'm almost coming to the point where I have to align all new engines in the Dutch trainset. I really hate it and I wondered if there's a way to make it easier? Does anyone from other (train)sets have a trick for quickly aligning sprites?

[Sanchimaru]

sorry, no idea...

However I discovered a quite fast way to add the transparent blue box to sprites, with Paint Shop Pro.

Maybe there is another way to do it, but I only know this:

> have an image's color depth set to 256
> pick transparent blue as the secondary color
> use the normal select tool and drag a box over one of the sprites (e.g. / view)
> use the magic selection wand + Ctrl to deselect the background color
> copy
> paste, and voila. The new selection appears automatically enclosed in a perfect fitting box with the transparent blue background

I don't know why this happens with 256 colors, or how could it be done in a higher color depth setting. But this is quite useful for drawing this kind of sprites.

But no clue about what you asked, that would be also quite useful, indeed

[Hyronymus]

Yeah, I figured it would be useful. Something tells me there should be a relation between sprite size and xpos/ypos values.

[Szappy]

aww... I was hoping to get you on IRC, but you're not here.

Yes, there is a correlation between x/ysize and x/yrel.
x/yrel ~= -x/ysize / 2
you can set these values in GRFMaker automatically:
enter the sprite block, select the desired sprites, and select 'XYrel' / 'set default values'.
Mind you, this will not be perfect for all sprites, but will be roughly good, so you'll only have to align them by a few pixels.

[Hyronymus]

And it works fast and quick, thx Szappy!