okay i gots a few questions bout land and terrain.

1. is it okay to make the level or village or whatever a giant picture? like take the village from the pog demo. now picture it as one giant jpeg. is that okay? is the jpeg format okay?

i was wondering this because i want to heavily personalize levels etc, even ones that use the same graphics, i can see doing this in photoshop very well.

the downside i see is game requirements in memory and the game download size going up.

the upside is overly unique levels that avoid a reptitive look in all levels, everywhere you go.

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YOU will have varied sucess with this, my iggest suggestion is to save the large images without a preview/custom icon or in graphic convertor without a resource fork, this will significantly lower the file size of the backgrounds....

one challenge may be with scrolling.

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Quote

Originally posted by DJ:
1. is it okay to make the level or village or whatever a giant picture? like take the village from the pog demo. now picture it as one giant jpeg. is that okay? is the jpeg format okay?

For what it's worth, PoG does just this in some places (the Learning Tree, the magic Tower in Trinity), though they're fairly small maps. I don't know for a fact how well it scales up to larger ones.

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I don't know what I'm talking about.
Oh no, here comes another learning experience.

okay cool, thx for de info, ill try making it a big map at 1st then maybe chopping it down even into pieces. while the overall map will be decently big, it will be smaller than many of pogs maps because it is played on a smaller scale aka near starcraft. so ill get to work on finishing the ground tiles, then constructing levels. get some friggin snaps up some year.

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(This message has been edited by DJ (edited 02-23-2003).)

Another thing to think about...I had it explained to me in shorthand, but you will not be able to use layers properly if using a large picture as a map, preventing your character from being able to walk behind things and such, makign the world look rather 2 dimensional

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ah i think i see what you mean, it doesnt apply to my game overly, my game is a bit out of the box for what coldstone was made for.

plus i think there are ways around it, like for trees, maybe cutting them out and including them at the same point as the others on a higher layer with transparency. would add more to the ram again, may work.

either way, thx again, ive started on making all kinds of dirt, coming out good so far, ill work down my list tomorrow of terrain and hopefully by next monday have some screenshots and website up.

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morvera ner morden

(This message has been edited by DJ (edited 02-24-2003).)