so i was messing around with swatches in photoshop, i wanted to find the “tokyo blablabla” swatches and while i was trying to find said swatches i noticed two things, aseprite doesn’t support .aco which is the swatches extension photoshop uses, and .ase alredy has a purpose in photoshop which is Adobe Swatches Exchange, which is used as another type of palette extension of adobe for god knows what, the thing is .ase on aseprite is the same as.aseprite, being a aseprite save file but if i try to open a .ase of photoshop it just causes an error and it doest even open the palette, and i think that may be a problem since you may not know what is a .ase from photoshop or a .ase from aseprite and that can cause some confusion in organization of our art files.
PS: i hope i conveyed the point well but my writing maybe be a bit confusing here.
File extension (in this case) does not tell anything about compatibility. It’s for an OS to identify what application to open that file with. In this case both Aseprite and Photoshop ended up using the same extension but the file format is totally different as is their purpose. For Aseprite it stores the working copy of your image / animations etc.and for Photoshop it stores the swatch data. I’d do as @BraidAcer suggests and use the .aseprite extension so files will be opens in their proper applications.
I KNOW I USE .aseprite, the thing is that .ase asksto be open in aseprte since i downloaded it first the .ase asks to be open in asaeprite, and if i had downloaded photoshop first it would probaly ask to be opne ther, so if anyone uses .ase it can cause huge trouble!!! IT IS a compatibility problem, especially since everyone photosohp is a standard for everything, it can possibily be a huge pain in the ass
the problem is, i cant use both file types at the same time, either opens on photosohp or in aseprite and if one is created on photosohp i cant use it on aseprite because is a totally different thing, its a compatibility issue with one of the most widely used softwares!
yeah, but you just wrote you use .aseprite extension anyway. so, if you have .aseprite associated with aseprite and .ase with photoshop, there is no conflict. it just so happens that different programs can use same extension - all three-letter extensions are already taken.
btw. .ase is not only used by photoshop and aseprite, it is also used by autocad. and if tomorrow some company decides to introduce another, completely different .ase file, there’s nothing to stop them.
it is just a minor inconvenience, not compatibility issue. compatibility issue would be if aseprite claimed it can open adobe swatch exchange files but couldn’t do it properly. compatibility issue would be if people who actually save their sprites as .ase files suddenly couldn’t open those files in aseprite.
Hi @Ethan_Buttazzi, how did you install Aseprite? through the .exe installer? If that is the case you can uncheck the .ase association in the installer steps.
Anyway there are two problems that we might fix for future versions:
Don’t check the .ase extension association with Aseprite by default
Disable the association when using Steam (installing Aseprite from steam will run a Steam script to associate the .ase extension with Aseprite)
It’s a shame because Microsoft has created a mess to handle the same file format from multiple apps. E.g. you have to modify the registry, restore it, or the original app has to restore the registry keys, etc. The situation on macOS is quite different: each application has an XML saying “I can open X type of file”, so that’s all, then you have the choice to select the app to open that kind of file.