Transparent Backgrounds?

[sunnies]

Is there any particular reason why transparent backgrounds on The Spriters Resource are few and far between? Depending the sprite sheet and background color used, getting a clean removal can sometimes be annoying.  Seems like it would be easier for everyone to just have them be transparent png's.   Thanks.

[Paraemon]

Transparency as in set through something like GIMP or Photoshop?

It was a cool thing in the 2000s but it totally screwed up certain sheets, the Sonic Advance series coming to mind. It's much better to set a color not standard to the game's palette to use for the transparency, and it's not hard to trigger that color to be the transparent one, rather than go through the effort to essentially make a sheet unusable if the sprite palette uses solid black.

[sunnies]

What about transparency makes sprites with solid back unusable? Not arguing, just curious. Thanks.

[Paraemon]

When users like myself don't often use programs beyond Paint, the black from the transparency set on the image and the solid black on the sprites are one, and they cannot be unconnected. Obviously the solution is to then use a program that can handle it but for me personally it takes away from what I'm more familiar with.

[Raccoon Sam]

a lot of it comes from a heavy legacy; i think MS Paint couldn't save PNG transparency back in the day.
in the end it doesn't really matter what color the background is, as long as it isn't a color already used by a color index of the sprites themselves. nonetheless, an ideal sheet is one with a transparent sheet background but with nontransparent sprite background (or vice-versa) because that's the only way you can preserve animation alignment (for example this https://www.spriters-resource.com/playst...et/151285/ ).