Request: New images for the ZC Wiki!

[XMuppetSB]

As you know, there are quite a few item images on the ZC Wiki that are way outdated. Additionally, nobody has uploaded any images for some of the items or most of the enemies in the ZQuest 2.5 beta default template.
Here are some images of every item and enemy in the default template:

http://img815.imageshack.us/img815/2882/zc250enemies.png
http://img441.imageshack.us/img441/753/zc250enemies2.png
http://img72.imageshack.us/img72/2144/zc250enemies3.png
http://img507.imageshack.us/img507/1862/zc250items.png
http://img18.imageshack.us/img18/7084/zc250items2.png
http://img841.imageshack.us/img841/1736/zc250items3.png
http://img190.imageshack.us/img190/6647/zc250items4.png
http://img10.imageshack.us/img10/926/zc250items5.png
http://img34.imageshack.us/img34/3628/zc250clock.png
http://img97.imageshack.us/img97/8840/zc250rupees.png

If anybody has the time, I need PNG images of every item and enemy here, and make sure the background is transparent.
As for animated/blinking items and flashing enemies, if anyone has a GIF animation program, I'd appreciate it if someone could make some animated GIFs of those items and enemies.
PS: If anyone can tell me how to do these kind of things, I would do it myself.

[Nicholas Steel]

Microsoft GIF Animator 2.x is probably the easiest GIF animation program I've seen. It's free now and was originally for like Windows 95 or 98 so it might be a 16bit program which will not work on x64 Windows.

[XMuppetSB]

Unfortunately, I've got Windows 7 x64...

[Joe123]

Have a look here (http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=free+gif+animator+windows+7&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&client=firefox-a)

[XMuppetSB]

And what would I need to do to save an image and not take away the transparency in the background? Saving images in MS Paint usually takes away transparency completely.

[Joe123]

That's because Paint's not designed to edit GIF images. If you edit something in a GIF animator it should have a 256 colour palette, which would mean your transparency is upheld so long as you keep transparent areas as the top-left colour.

[Nicholas Steel]

Unfortunately, I've got Windows 7 x64...

Wikipedia have it for download and it works fine last time I checked though I forget if I ever tried it under Win 7 x64..

[XMuppetSB]

That's because Paint's not designed to edit GIF images. If you edit something in a GIF animator it should have a 256 colour palette, which would mean your transparency is upheld so long as you keep transparent areas as the top-left colour.

Well, okay... but when I asked about transparency, I meant for PNG images as well. As while the Windows 7 version of MS Paint can view transparent PNG images, saving them causes them to lose their transparency.

[Joe123]

Just get a decent image editor, MS Paint's awful...
Pretty much anything that's not MS Paint's gonna handle transparency better than Paint can.

[XMuppetSB]

Thank you so much, Joe. I found the programs I needed, and now I've been very busy making and uploading images. For starters, I had to make the PNG images in Paint first, then I had to make their backgrounds transparent in GIMP, which I'm using specifically for transparency purposes. I'm also using some of those PNG images to make animated GIFs in the Falco GIF Animator, even though I have to change the color of the background before saving it as a GIF. Then I had to close the program and reopen it, then reopen the file and edit the background from there. And I had to adjust the animation rate thingy as well. Anyway, check the uncategorized images on ZC Wiki. You'll see that I have uploaded many new PNG images, as well as a few animated GIFs.
EDIT: Well, now that I got all the help I needed, I guess I'll give this puppy some closure.
PS: I also made a 1.92 PNG image, using the 1.90 and 2.10 PNG images, so think of it as a placeholder until someone can make a better 1.92 PNG, and in a different color, like blue.

[Joe123]

Good work.
The scaling algorithm you're using isn't really the best one for this kind of application though, you only really want to increase to 4x size and use nearest neighbour or something, you've got some kind of anti-aliasing one going and it doesn't really look right (see how the edges are blurry rather than looking like NES pixel art?)

[XMuppetSB]

Well, I must admit. Most of the images that were already there before are a bit blurry around the edges when enlarged to 300x300. Say, how do you increase the images to 4x size?

[Joe123]

I might be tempted to do it in Paint actually XD
Only because I've used paint before and not the GIMP or that other one though (Graphics Gale is very good!).

If you have the images in paint, select the whole thing and then go to 'Enlarge' (or 'Scale' or something similar), then put in an integer scale factor (or it might be like '200%' or something), then it'll scale it up pixel by pixel. For most applications you want a bit of blurry/anti-aliasing on the edges because otherwise they look really jagged, but if you're trying to make something look like pixel art then jagged's what you want.

[XMuppetSB]

Problem is, when I re-size an image in Paint, it tends to change the color of some of the pixels in the image, forcing me to recolor them.

[Joe123]

Make sure you save it as a .png or .gif file before you edit it.