This may be a quick question, but when I'm making a sprite, how many cycles of the animation should I make? should I go halfway, and CC will play it backwards again to return to the beginning? OR should I draw two full strides, ~6 frames total?

Also, people may have seen my halo mod, and this is relating to that. I'm actually going back to work on it again.

Alright, I'll try it now. If it doesn't work soon, I'm going to smash something.

Any idea why my sprites are showing up all glitchy? The purple is showing, sometimes it's covered in gray stripes, I dunno. I'm sure they're in 24bit bitmaps though.

And upon further consideration, how the ♥♥♥♥ do you make 8-bit bitmaps? Paint only does 16, 24, 256

You dont save it in an 8-bitmap file.. it saves it automatically as one because it would be in palette (Unlike your sprite since its all glitchy)
YOUR SPRITE IS NOT IN PALETTE

Uh, paint does 256 colours, not 256bit. that would be a ♥♥♥♥ of a high fidelity file.
You do it in one direction, look at the vanilla files. Go search for the HOW TO FIX YOUR SPRITES PALETTE topic. If you're using windows7 paint you're boned, go get an older version.

Use graphics gale. Copy an game file then sprite over that, it gives you the entire palate and converts sprites to the palate automatically.

I love GraphicsGale's palette function. I have the CC palette set as my default on it.

Photoshop is also pretty prime for it. i'd recomend it.. but not freeware

Ah you and your fancy shmancy photoshop, MSPaint is the way to go.

Not really. photoshop, gimp and graphicsgale are.

I concur.

Anyway, about the first question.
You only need 4-7 sprites, going from the leg being in a /\ position to it being fully straight.

Graphics gale is. The palette function saves a load of time.

You're an idiot paint does the same thing you can even paste from the web and get it converted to an indexed image no hassle please stop touting GG as if it's the only thing that can deal with indexing. Sure, there's no proper conversion other than opening an image with the palette already there, but I doubt you didn't rip the palette from a base sprite regardless. Not saying Gale is a bad program or disagreeing with you about it saving time, but the fact that MSPaint (bar the newest iteration) can do the same thing and you were basing your direction on that feature is ridiculous.
People can sprite in whatever program they like, learning in something as simple as paint can be beneficial to your technique, learning in a more complex program can work just as well its a matter of preference there is no one way to go rawr angst angst angst

Gimp is still the best program ever, all the others are posers, etc. etc.[/halfassedfangirl]

Yeah, anything mentioned should do you fine as long as you can understand and utilize the interface effectively.

Entirely offtopic but I'm warming to gimp again because I'm having to use it on my *nix book (way too lazy to try and get cs4 working in wine), but I still hate hate hate the interface. Sure, I can learn the quirks and how to get around them, but you'd think they'd kind of cease to exist after x years in development. I suppose everyone working on it just has a different idea of ergonomic to me.

Everything feels natural to me, but then again I've only used Photoshop for schoolwork, while I've used Gimp for everything for years.
Incidentally, have you tried Gimpshop?

Yeah, but it's not the same *whine whine* I suppose I'm just spoilt.
I can live with GIMP, but definitely prefer Photoshop.