Hey all,
I am in the final stages of putting together my WW2 game, The World At War 1939 - 1945 and I was just wondering what are the best free programs to use to create land, sea and air unit graphics? (Infantry, tanks, fighters, battleships etc...)
Out of interest my "players" are: Germany, UK, USA, USSR, Italy, France, China and Japan.
Thanks in advance :D
was just wondering what are the best free programs to use to create land, sea and air unit graphics?
This would be an easy question to answer if you hadn't said the word free. There are a lot of great graphics programs out there, and it basically boils down to you preference of use and your budget. Some good ones are Macromedia Freehand (my personal preference), Corel Draw (very similar to Freehand), Adobe Illustrator and Jasc Paintshop pro. The cheapest among those is Paintshop pro which retails for less than $100. It actually is quite a versatile product as it does both vector (drawing) and raster (photograph or pixelated) drawing formats. However, it can be somewhat difficult to master. The most expensive is Illustrator, followed by Freehand and Corel Draw. Paintshop pro actually has a demo version you can download from their site to try it out. The only free no strings attached drawing program is the Gimp. However, it's geared more towards raster graphics and the learning curve on it is very steep. My advice to you is to search e-bay or the bargin bin of your local software store for an older/used version of one of the graphics programs I mentioned above. Corel Draw may be your best bet to find in a software store, while you will probably be able to find any one of these pieces of software on E-bay. Older versions are often a fraction of the original price of the software, not to mention what it would cost to purchase the current version new.
Sorry I don't have better news. You could always try using clip art for your graphics which may be a lot faster/easier in the long run.
HTH,
Darke
I use Ulead PhotoImpact which you can find at most computer stores for around $49 (or from the web of course). It has everything I've ever needed and much more. As I was reading your post I remembered that there are military art fonts (webdings I think) that you might want to check out. There are planes, tanks, and tons of other art that when printed are crisp. I wasn't sure if you were meaning to put together a prototype or go into production from your post, but Word is the best thing to use for initial prototypes because the drawing tools along with fonts can give you pretty much anything you need to make a half way decent looking game very quickly.
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Thanks guys, you've helped me get my bearings. I have Paintshop Pro 5.0, Im going to fiddle with it and learn how to use it and try to draw my prototype units. Sorry I forgot to mention Im in that stage where its a playable game but it is nowhere near proffessional or even in a serious prototype stage, if that makes sense. I'll continue searching around and trying to use graphics programs to draw my units but for now I will probably use paper squares, coloured to each nations colours and then labelled with insignia to represent what they are.
Anyway thanks again for all your help and if anyone has any more suggestions, please list them it will really help me out :)
Thanks in advance,
Tim