Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 1-15
.
Google the term “InkScape,” go to the Inkscape Download page, and click the icon that matches your
OS
If you want to use the 64-bit Windows version of Inkscape, scroll down, and take a
look at the text links below these three icons to access that particular OS download.
Once you have downloaded the software, right-click it and Run as administrator, and
install the software on your workstation. If you have a previous version of Inkscape,
the installation will upgrade it to the latest version; you do not need to use the Pro-
grams and Features utility that you used earlier in the chapter to uninstall your SDK
and IDEs, which do not upgrade previous versions, like new media production soft-
ware packages tend to do.
After the software is installed, create a Quick Launch icon on your taskbar so that
you can launch Inkscape with a single click of the mouse. Next, you will install a popu-
lar digital imaging software package, called
GIMP
, which will allow you to create
“raster,” or pixel-based (bitmap), artwork for your games in JPEG, PNG, or GIF digital
image file formats supported by JavaFX. Raster images are different from vector, or
shape, illustrations, so you will need GIMP.
Downloading and Installing GIMP
JavaFX also supports 2D images that use
raster
image technology, which represents
images as an array of pixels and is commonly used in digital image compositing soft-
ware packages, such as Adobe Photoshop and Corel Painter. In this section, you will
download and install the popular open-source digital image editing and compositing
software package called GIMP. This software is available for the Linux, Windows,
Solaris, FreeBSD, and Mac OSs.
To find the GIMP software on the Internet, go to Google Search, and type in
GIMP
, as demonstrated in
Figure 1-16
.
