preferably free but not too bothered

*knows Tilly will say GIMP*

doesnt matter i forgot to install jasc animation shop 3 when i downloaded and installed paint shop 9.

PLEASE delete this thread now, its compleatly useless.

I prefer GIMP 1.25 to Animation Shop/PSP in most cases...I only really use it to string together screenshots I take and save them as an animation, then optimize/edit in GIMP.

Some reason GIMP's no good?

i've never been able to get the hang of GIMP and all i could do in the animation was make a rev raptor blink.

and on a side note "Bow to my 2-Cell animations of DOOM! well there actually of legacy but doom sounds better......."

EDIT: also do you know how to make them walk sideways across the screen like andy on pheotypes does his?

That's a marquee tag around them...

GIMP's animation tools take a lot of getting used to, I'll agree. But...er...what were you trying to do?

do you mean with the animation program? or with asking how to get images to go sideards across the screen?

Animation.

If you're using GIMP 2, I've never animated with it...though I can try.

Animation shop 3 is in fact really easy because its all set up for you with a line of frames. Though it doesnt have many tool its good to as a start out programs.

But if you want a really good yet easy program I suggest you get Macromedia's Flash MX. Its extremly easy to use and set up really well with all sorts of neat options.

animation wise its random stuff, like making things walk, fire weapons execute attacks ect (mainly sprites) and yes animation shop is extreemly simple to use.

Agreed! Flash is great...its quite easy to use though it has some pitfalls I find difficult to get around, for example an interactive flash it's tedious to get flash to react to a click, say you clicked a button and you want a fade out animation, its possible to do so with actionscript but it's so damn difficult it's too much of a hassel...

Flash also employs vector graphics so I don't know...would sprities look good as vector images? Probably..because they're so small you get the benefit of being able to enlarge them without any image quality loss...but there's also macromedia freehand...but it's not animation...

Im also looking for a good animation program.Iv already got a good art program(painter classic)and all thats needed is an animation disk...

I so want Painter and a tablet. *envy*

I also want Flash...more to draw with than anything. I LOVE vectors, but PSP 6's vector tools are awful. At least it can save to PSP 5 compatible format so I can shove 'em into GIMP as raster data to mess with. Funfun.