The form shows the image in the middle and a number of basic drawing buttons at the left. Here you can zoom in and out, draw pixels, lines, rectangles, text, etc. Note that the color depends on whether you use the left or right mouse button. For some drawing tools you can set properties (like line width or border visibility). There is a special button to change all pixels that have one color into another color. This is in particular useful to change the background color that is used for transparency. On the toolbar there are some special buttons to move all pixels in the image in a particular direction. Also you can indicate whether to show a grid when the image is zoomed (works only with a zoom factor of at least 4).
You can select areas in the usual way by pressed the select button and then drawing a rectangle. Next you place the mouse inside the selected area to move it somewhere else. Normally the original area is filled with the left mouse color. If you move the selection with the <Shift> key pressed, the original area will remain unaffected. With the <Shift> key you can also make multiple copies of the selected area. If you use the right mouse button for moving rather than the left mouse button, the selection is considered to be transparent.
The text tool might required some additional explanation. To add a text, press the text button and then click on the image. A pop-up window appears in which you can enter the text. Use the # symbol to insert a newline. Once you press OK the text is put in the image, with a box around it. You can now move the text by pressing with the mouse in the box and dragging the text. You can change the text by clicking with the right mouse button in the box. Using the Text menu you can also change the alignment and the font to be used.
At the right of the form you can select the colors to be used (one by the left mouse button and one by the right button). There are four ways to change the color. First of all you can click with the mouse button (left or right) in one of the 16 basic colors. Note that there is a special color box that contains the color of the bottom-left pixel of the image that is used as transparency color if the sprite is transparent. You can use this color to make part of your image transparent. The second way is to click in the image with the changing color. Here you choose many more colors. You can hold down the mouse to see the color you are selecting. Thirdly, you can click with the left mouse in the boxes indicating the left and right color. A color dialog pops up in which you can select the color. Finally, you can select the color dropper tool at the left and click on a position in the image to copy the color there.
There are two special features. When you hold the <Ctrl> key you can pick a drawing color from the current image. When you hold the <Shift> key while drawing lines you will only get horizontal, vertical, or diagonal lines. Similar, when you hold the <Shift> key while drawing ellipses or rectangles you will get circles and squares.
In the menus you can finds the same transformation and image changing commands that are also available in the sprite editor. This time though they only apply to the current image. (When the sprite has multiple images, commands that change the size, like stretch, are not available.) You can also save the image as a bitmap file. There are two additional commands in the Image menu:
Note that more fancy drawing routines are missing. For this you should use a more advanced drawing program (or simply the paint program that comes with Windows). The easiest way to do this is to use the copy button to put the image on the clipboard. Now in your painting program, use paste to get it. Change it and copy it to the clipboard. Now, in Game Maker you can paste the updated image back in.
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