SCI pictures use a special "vector"ed format. The way SCI Studio edits them is the same way Sierra created/edited their pictures way back when, and the same way the intepreter reads/displays them. As a matter of fact, SCI Studio's picture editor is easier than the original one Sierra used.
However, because of the file format of SCI pictures, you have no choice on how they are edited. If it was up to me, I would have done a nice picture editor like Paint Shop Pro, but then the SCI games wouldn't be able to use them. The interpreter doesn't really load a "picture", it just draws the lines, blocks, and other stuff you drew when making the picture.
For example, let's say you draw a blue line from 10,20 to 40,50 and then draw a green line from 35,22 to 86,170 in SCI Studio, then save your picture. If you use the picture in a game, the intepreter loads the picture, draws a blue line from 10,20 to 40,50 and then draws a green line from 35,22 to 86,170, then displays what it's drawn.
The pictures aren't stored pixel by pixel, but rather drawing step to drawing step. Even though VGA pics have pixel by pixel visual images, their priority and control screens still use the vectored format.
There is currently no way of editing SCI VGA pictures, but they are pretty much just SCI VGA Views for the visual screen and SCI EGA Pics for the priority/control screens. Since I've written both a SCI VGA view editor and SCI EGA picture editor, it wouldn't be hard to build one. However, I'm focusing 100% of my efforts on the SCI0 template game.
SCI1 games aren't too different from SCI0. I've already whipped up an SCI1 view editor, font editor and cursor editor, as well as a compiler/disassembler. Like I said though, I want to get SCI0 done 100% first.
