Hello, when i make a ship set of frames for evn, it shows up in game as a box with the image in it, eg it has just selected a cube of picture from the rle8 and put it in game. I have not written the shan myself but sorted it for the width/breadth of the imported image. I am on windows using EVNEW. Can anyone help me solve this problem?

Please direct questions about developing plugs to the EV Developer's Corner forum.

I'll just move this one over there now.

cubes are three dimensional, so i dont really understand. Perhaps some screenshots / a copy of the plugin would help anyone give a less useless answer.

You need to make masks. The game doesn't automatically make the black part transparent, it is just usually black because it will be on a black bakground for the most part in-game. However, it can be anything from black to white to gray to fuschia to rainbow or even plad, but you need a mask.

Also, you mean rlĂŤD, right? EVNEW can't create rlĂŤ8s.

i thought the rel8 was the mask for the coresponding rled....

but i havent played with that enough to know any better

NebuchadnezzaR, on Oct 15 2004, 03:00 AM, said:

i thought the rel8 was the mask for the coresponding rled....

but i havent played with that enough to know any better
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No, 'tis the 8 bit version of the rleD (which is 16 bit).

Difficult to help without more info, but you could just check that all the other fields of your shan are correct (ie. the FramesPer field).

This post has been edited by Guy : 14 October 2004 - 11:02 PM

Ah, cool. Hmm... what use is the 8 bit version? Ive not seen anything on this...

Lets see... when making a shan for a ship or whatever, you need to make a bitmap image of all the animation frames in sequence, usualy in 6x6 grids.

Base.gif (4.37K)
Number of downloads: 44

(I cut the banking frames to save space, but any extra frames are just tacked on the end anyway. I don't know if EVNew has EnRLE/DeRLE built in, but if it does, try running it on a shan to see the full embedded pict files, or if you want I could send you a few examples.)

To make the mask, you can either use a graphics program ala Photoshop, or use P2S (Picts to sprites) if EVNew has it built in. For Photoshop, use the magic wand to select the black in the image, invert the selection so it selects everything BUT the black, delete it, and fill it with white. Save it as a bitmap and voila.

Mask.gif (1.55K)
Number of downloads: 32

If you want to use running lights, engine glow etc... you have to make base and mask picts for them as well.

You must then make a shan resource which uses the pict files, or convert the picts to rleD and rle8 resources using EnRLE and use those.
(By the way, rleD contains 16 bit graphics, while rle8 contains 8 bit, not base and mask.)
The spins they contain hold both base and mask, so you can either leave the RID#s for the base and mask the same as the picts, or you can just use the base. (i.e., if you use picts, you have to fill in both the base and mask RID#s, but for RLEs, you only need to use the base RID#s, the mask RID#s dont matter.)

I hope that explains it all...

Does that mean the image is actually 23 bits with one bit of alpha?

thats a bit odd...

would be nice if a real alpha chanel were supported...

NebuchadnezzaR, on Oct 15 2004, 04:31 AM, said:

Does that mean the image is actually 23 bits with one bit of alpha?

thats a bit odd...

would be nice if a real alpha chanel were supported...
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Er, what?

By the way, EVNEW has great problems making Rlë8s (for lack of palette info, it is said, read the EVNEW ReadMe for more info). Plus, the PC version of Nova only considers the RlëDs, that are dithered to 8-bit at runtime if the screen is in 256 colors, and completely disregards the Rlë8s. The Rlë8 are considered only by the Mac version of Nova if the screen is set to 256 colors. Which is the reason that, for development and testing on your PC, only do RlëDs. Then before releasing the plug, once it is completed, try to have a Mac guy do the Rlë8s for you.

NebuchadnezzaR, on Oct 14 2004, 09:31 PM, said:

Does that mean the image is actually 23 bits with one bit of alpha?

thats a bit odd...

would be nice if a real alpha chanel were supported...
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I think it's more like an 8 (rlë8) or 16 (rlëD) bit image with a 1 bit alpha channel.

Full greyscale alpha channels would be very nice, indeed.

This post has been edited by Weepul 884 : 15 October 2004 - 04:56 PM

Hi i would just like to personally thank Picquilarius, for although i havent tried it yet, it did indeed help me a very large amount. Thanks

There are no alpha channels in any Nova sprites.

For the technically inclined, 8 bit colour uses 3 bits for one colour, 3 bits for another and one of the colours loses out and gets 2 bits. That's blue, from memory. This is one of the reasons why 8 bit colour is often replaced by adaptive indexes of colours -- 256 unique colours that suit a given scene very well. OpenGL uses indexed colours to very good effect.

16 bit colour operates in a similar way, but there's no option for indexes. Two colours get 5 bits each while the last gets 6.

24 bit colour, which Nova doesn't use, has an even 8 bits for each colour. It's often packed with 8 bits of alpha information (256 levels of transparency) for a full 32 bits.

Some special computers, particularly RealityEngine or InfiniteReality graphics on SGI computers, can support hundreds of bits of colour and alpha information per channel. This is very useful for proper colour proofing in film and video.

best always,

Dave @ ATMOS