Utility, by 
Before and after ICE Man’s successful attempt at extracting JJ2 sprites, we’ve had several questions about the editing of those sprites. If someone asked ‘Can you edit JJ2 sprites?’ just one day ago, the short answer would be: ‘no’. But if that question were asked today, the inquiring person would be pleasantly surprised.
Neobeo once told me that he wasn’t a very good at writing forum posts. Once he simply let someone else do the writing for him and then copied and pasted it into one of his own posts. But this is not the case with Jazz Sprite Dynamite. I’ve seen the thread http://www.jazz2online.com/jcf/showthread.php?t=14900 and it introduces people to the program quite well. (Also, those screenshots looked very, very delicious.) Before I saw the thread I thought the program was not for me but was convinced otherwise 15 seconds later.
The readme was incredibly helpful and I got started in no time. All you do is back up your anims.j2a and load up the program. From here on, you will see a main screen, where the actual sprite and editing tools are, as well as some scroll bars. The top bar is the set ID, where one or more animations are kept. The middle bar enables the browsing through of animations, and the bottom bar enables you to view individual sprites in an animation. Think folders, sub-folders, and files.
After you set the ‘Make file read-only’ option to off, from under the File menu, you can start editing. You only have a limited number of colours; the same number JJ2 has (duh). There are lines, circles, rectangles and various other nifty editing tools for you to speed up work, but most of the time you’ll just have to edit sprites pixel by pixel. Fortunately, JazzSD is quite fast and you can see your results directly on the little screen to the top right. To save, you only need to switch set ID or close the program. What I don’t quite understand is why the Save option exists…I strongly recommend keeping the edits you made in memory and NOT savew whenever you switch set IDs and have the program prompt you for a save/cancellation if you decide to close it without manually saving through.
You won’t, however, be able to run JJ2 without first ‘patching’ it, which JazzSD does for you in ways I don’t understand (having an unpatch function is a nice bonus since it involves one less file to back up ;-)).
It all works seamlessly. I don’t even know how to test for bugs…the program seems too simple for that. I just pick a colour and click on the main screen, save it, and watch it all in JJ2…! Then there are the advanced functions, such as hotspot, coldspot, gunspot, boundaries, which will be needed when editing specific sprites such as missiles/bullets and, I think, sprites of a certain size. The readme is a lifesaver on this one…and it’s not even finished yet.
Did you know that the hot/coldspots for the 10, 20 and 50 coin bonus warps are at 24, 45 and 24, 54 respectively? Only the 100 coin bonus warp has its hot/coldspots at 28, 39 and 28, 54 respectively. (It’s also worth noting that the checkboxes for hot/coldspots work, but the gunspot will not disappear whether the box is checked or not).
Even if all you’re going to do is muck about with weird new sprites like me, you should still give it a try and download. You can export your amazing/abysmal new sprites as .gif/.png files and you can also import .png files.
Oven-warmly recommended and a 9.2. I think we have a strong candidate for this month’s featured upload. Let’s just wait for the updates.
