Okay, here's the deal. I've made some ship graphics for a plug-in I've made (Varen Shant). I think that the ships are good, only there is a problem (hence why I'm making this post). The ship graphics 'crackle' when I turn them in the game. This is really bugging me and I can't seem to fix it. At first I thought I had made them with far too many colours (I was using 32-bit by mistake), so I tryed to change it, but it still didn't work. This is getting really annoying as it is delaying the launch of my plug.

Can somebody help, even the correct colour pallete to use, anything will be helpfull.

Cheers.

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Dreadnought/Zornelle
dreadnought@angelfire.com
Could Somebody Dim The Sun? It's Too Bright

Quote

Originally posted by Dreadnought:
**Okay, here's the deal. I've made some ship graphics for a plug-in I've made (Varen Shant). I think that the ships are good, only there is a problem (hence why I'm making this post). The ship graphics 'crackle' when I turn them in the game. This is really bugging me and I can't seem to fix it. At first I thought I had made them with far too many colours (I was using 32-bit by mistake), so I tryed to change it, but it still didn't work. This is getting really annoying as it is delaying the launch of my plug.

Can somebody help, even the correct colour pallete to use, anything will be helpfull.

Cheers.

**

I have had this problem before, You need to re-render the ships. :frown:
It's all to do with the EV/O game engne,
becose it is 8bit color the ship sprites need to be a multiple of 8 (8, 16, 24, 32, 40, 48,ect...).

Because EVN is 16bit the sprites can be a multiple of 4!

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R & R software

Quote

Originally posted by Rodger:
Because EVN is 16bit the sprites can be a multiple of 4!

That makes no sense whatsoever... Bit depth and what the engine requires as per the size of each frame are unrelated.

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Quote

Originally posted by Weepul 884:
**That makes no sense whatsoever... Bit depth and what the engine requires as per the size of each frame are unrelated.

**

OK, you try it.

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R & R software

its either a problem with the mask, try re-rendering that, or size problem... and sprite sizes DO need to be a multiple of 8..

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DeAdBoY-
(url="http://"http://www.grybs.com/harzius")Harzius Productions(/url)
(url="http://"http://www.IcedEarth.com")Iced Earth(/url)

If it's a size problem (and it sounds like it is) you can fix it without re-rendering: just resize your whole sprites and masks to a multiple of 8. I can't say that'll work in every case, necessarily, but I've done it sucessfully when I had sprites that were off by a few pixels.

Or, instead of scaling, you could add a black border of whatever size was neccessary, around each frame of the spin & mask. A bit of a pain (I've done it) but it avoids introducing any scaling artifacts. Or you can just re-render, as has been said.

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(Insert Signature Here)

Thanks, but I think I've tryed all of that before. I'll try re-rendering the mask, I've not done that before.

It's possible that after I finished each of the pictures and was putting it together (making the sprite picture needed by the EV/O engige) that I made a mistake and didn't put it together correctly (I was a pixel or two over).

And I knew about the multiple of 8, I don't think it is that.

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Dreadnought/Zornelle
dreadnought@angelfire.com
Could Somebody Dim The Sun? It's Too Bright

Send me the sprites (the 32bit ones) @ startrekev@mac.com and I'll fix'em up for you

Send me the original file though (the QT one or the PICS file) if possible as that would make my job tremendously easier.

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"Internet is so big, so powerful and pointless that for some people it is a complete substitute for life."
-Andrew Brown
Star Trek Escape Velocity
(url="http://"http://homepage.mac.com/startrekev/")http://homepage.mac.com/startrekev/(/url)

(This message has been edited by Metzen (edited 11-15-2000).)

Quote

Originally posted by Rodger:
**OK, you try it.
**

Uh, how? EV3 isn't out yet...

What I meant is that the EV engine can demand whatever it wants for sprite size guidelines. Meaning, how EV and EVO want multiples of 8. I never said EV3 wouldn't only need multiples of 4, just that increasing the bit depth doesn't do anything to change the size requirements. What did you mean? (Weepul is still confused)

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Quote

Originally posted by Weepul 884:
**Uh, how? EV3 isn't out yet...

What I meant is that the EV engine can demand whatever it wants for sprite size guidelines. Meaning, how EV and EVO want multiples of 8. I never said EV3 wouldn't only need multiples of 4, just that increasing the bit depth doesn't do anything to change the size requirements. What did you mean? (Weepul is still confused)

**

On the PowerPC, the fastest way to move data around is via the 64 bit floating point registers! A lot of custom blitters (to move images to screen) use PowerPC floating point assembly instuctions to load a bunch of fp registers and move them all at once to the screen memory. If your sprite is a muliple of 64 bits wide (8 pixels at 8 bits per pixel) then you don't have to worry about only moving half registers and so on. I suspect (but don't know) that Matt uses a custom blitter for ship animation that makes use of 64 bit registers of some kind, so the constraint that sprites need to be 8 pixel mulitples in EVO. If he continues to use a 64 bit blitter in EVN then 4 pixels x 16 bits will be 64 bits, so we may be able to have multiples of 4 pixels. It isn't such a problem tho, you can always pad your sprites out to 8 pixel muliples with black and get almost no degradation in speed.

Soooo... If Matt uses a 64 bit blitter then I expect a muliple of 4 pixel sprites in 16 bit colour. Needless to say, quickdraw could handle odd sizes (at some expense of speed) but I don't know how it is handled internally in EVO. On Non-PowerPC macs the blitters are usually optimized for 32 bit registers - ie 4 pixels at 8bit , but I've never tried EVO on non-powermacs

Just my guesses!
Ralph

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(url="http://"http://www.sutherland-studios.com.au/family/evo_software.html")R & R Software(/url)

BTW ShipWrite uses Quickdraw to animate the sprites, and will (unfortunately) handle any sized sprite! The Animation looks fine in the display even with say 100 pixel sprites. However if you don't want masking problems in EVO then you need to use 8 pixel multiples.

Cheers
Ralph

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(url="http://"http://www.sutherland-studios.com.au/family/evo_software.html")R & R Software(/url)

Quote

Originally posted by Ralph:
**BTW ShipWrite uses Quickdraw to animate the sprites, and will (unfortunately) handle any sized sprite! The Animation looks fine in the display even with say 100 pixel sprites. However if you don't want masking problems in EVO then you need to use 8 pixel multiples.

Cheers
Ralph

**

I ran into that exact same problem. Once you get the hang of it, though, ShipWrite makes it soooooo much easier to manage sprites. You just need to get it so that one frame (One position of the ship) of the sprite fills exactly one of the squares in the 6x6 grid. You could figure it out on paper or in a drawing program, but why do it the hard way when ShipWrite does it for you? Also, keep in mind that the size of one frame must be square. For example: if a frame is 56 pixels wide, it must also be 56 pixels long.

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May the world never rest in peace.

(This message has been edited by goomeister (edited 11-19-2000).)