Window overview

Sprite Explorer has a very comfortable interface. There is nothing hard in it – the windows can be divided into the main menu, toolbar, and frames viewer and information panels. Here we'll describe the icons, which can be found on toolbar and tell you what the information panels do.

Above, there is an image of Sprite Explorer's toolbar. Now I'll try to describe each icon of the toolbar.
Icons, including drop-down menu are numbered from 1 to 15 as their position from left to right.

Number | Caption | Description
1 | Create new HL sprite file | Launches the sprite creation wizard, which will help you to create a new sprite. Click here to find more about this wizard.
2 | Open HL sprite file | Loads a Half-Life sprite from a folder into Sprite Explorer.
3 | Previous file in folder | Loads a sprite, which is previous in the folder (or .pak, if sprite is loaded from it)
4 | Next file in folder | Reads a sprite which is next in the folder to active sprite (or in .pak, if sprite is loaded from it)
5 | Drop-down menu | Shows list of sprites, found in folder of active sprite, or from the whole .pak file, to make navigation in folders easier.
6 | Copy frame to clipboard | Copies selected frame to the clipboard, so you can paste it wherever you want (in mspaint or winword for example)
7 | Save single frame to .GIF | Saves select frame to .GIF. If there are multiple frames select, it will save first selected frame.
8 | Save single frame to .tga | The same as before but saves the frame to targa graphics format.
9 | Save selected frames to .gif | Saves selected frames into a .gif file. You can select multiple frames also by clicking on them and holding Ctrl.
10 | Save selected to .GIF’s | The same as before but saves frames into seperate .GIF files.
11 | Decompile sprite (.qc) | Exports the whole sprite to a collection of .GIF's and a .qc file, so it can be compiled by Sprite Explorer or SprGen utility.
12 | Save sequence to .gif | Exports whole sprite to .gif animation file.
13 | Read html manual | Launches your browser with Sprite Explorer's help system which you are reading now :)
14 | About Sprite Explorer | Displays dialog box with information about program authors. You can send us email, by clicking on a name.
15 | Quit application | Quits Sprite Explorer.

Information panels are situated at the right and the bottom. The one at right shows you the sprite's animated preview and information about the sprite, such as size, kind and transparency mode (format). The panel at the bottom shows you the hint of a GUI element on the window: for example when you'll move the cursor to a button on the toolbar, you'll see a hint there. Also Sprite Explorer’s state label is situated here (it has [PAK] or [FAT] text on it). It shows whether active sprite was loaded from a folder or directly from .pak. When you are loading a sprite on this panel, you can see the progress bar, which shows the progress of loading procedure.