I don't know about alpha channel but some of the key features that make it good are: lighting. There us a little box with a circle in it, the circle represents the light source, you can move the circle around to control where the light is coming from in your tile. Random fill, you can make (usually) seamless grass,desert,water,dirt very quickly. On the pallette you can select more than one color at once, then when you do random fill it will use all the colors you selected and randomly make a texture with smootheed edges between colors. Also the more than one color select can be used to make standing-outish rectangles, eclipses and other things. It puts the darkest colors around the edges and uses the other colors until the lightest color is on the inside. Unlimited undos while you're working on one tile. 1 word, awesome. Hope that helps. One more thing, I don't know if Im the only one but in the new SGDK2 graphics editor the white and gray diamond background always screws me up when I have to do some erasing. Not the tile, my mind gets screwed up I think it would be better with just a plain white bg. Or can this already be done?
