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Sprite Editing


To edit the hotspot for a sprite you first select the window displaying the sprite. Use the arrow keys to shift the sprite relative to it's hotspot. Every sprite also contains "advance" information that is used by Font Fiend and potentially your game code when displaying text strings. The advance information tells the string renderer how far to advance the cursor after a font character is displayed.

To edit advance info you hold down the CTRL key while pressing arrow keys. For example, let's say the spacing between letters on the words "Game Over" isn't perfect due to a big gap between the "a" and "m" characters in the word "Game". The easiest way to fix this is to go to the main menu bar and, under the Set heading, click New Window. Click Insert Button in the Sprite List window and create a button with the words "Game Over". Click the other window and use the sprite list to select either the "a" or the "m". If you have selected "a" then you will be changing the advance information to make spacing after the "a" is drawn smaller - hold down control and the left arrow key and you will see the "m" (and all subsequent text) slide one pixel towards the "a". If you wanted to instead change the "m" hotspot information then you would select the "m" and use the arrow keys without pressing CTRL to move the "m" around. Hotspot editing is very important to making proportional text look great.

The X on the toolbar can be used to move the "master" hotspot that all sprites within a window are drawn around. This has nothing to do with the hotspot information stored in the sprite file, it's just used to reposition the spot that sprites are drawn around when using the editor.

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