i was wondering do i have to use pct and png for animations and graphics? is gif and jpeg okay? do windows builds support pct? i think i may have screwed up and already gif'ed a couple hundred pics, was wondering if i should stop and redo them. i thought i remembered someone saying coldstone only supported pct and png or maybe i was loopy, then later people ask if its okay to use jpegs and i thinkt he answer was yes. any clarification would be helpfull before i continue on thx!

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Morvera ner Morden

I'm using .pct .png and .jpg in my project. I haven't tried .gif yet, though.
Post number 1111...

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A tomb now suffices for him for whom the world was not enough.

(This message has been edited by Celchu (edited 03-02-2003).)

moreso i was using gifs with dropped out backgrounds aka a transparent background, not sure if thats okay yet, ill toss some files cj's way and see if it works.

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Morvera ner Morden

PICT and PNG are probably the best formats to use.

You can use JPEG if you must, but due to its lossy compression, it won't work well with the "white = transparent" way that Coldstone does sprites and such. It should be OK for backgrounds and other non-transparent images, so long as you don't mind the compression artifacts that the format will give you.

As for GIF... I've never tried it, but I'd be fairly surprised if Coldstone were able to make use of it. Let us know what you find out.

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

DJ, I think it's bad news for you! pct files seem to work the best. It's my experience that using transparency does not work, but that you need to use pure white as the background. I use Snapz Pro 2 -- very useful and saves much time. I'm sorry.

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-- Debra
Danillitphil Productions

If you've already created a ton of graphics files in GIF or some other format, just go grab yourself a copy of Graphics Converter and batch a file conversion from GIF to PCT. It's a great time saver and I do it all the time(I usually do whatever graphic work that I need on a PC which won't save to .pct format. So I save files as png and then convert on the mac).

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yah i noticed all my stuff showed up as a white background in coldstone, if white is transparent, how do you make white that isnt transparent? i noticed in the coldstone POG graphics that the game bar at the bottom has a pct underneath it solid white? wouldnt that be transparent also?

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Morvera ner Morden

Quote

Originally posted by DJ:
if white is transparent, how do you make white that isnt transparent?

Coldstone has two transparency methods - "white = transparent" and true alpha-masking. As far as I know, the two are mutually exclusive. Some people seem to have had trouble with this, but in my experience, using an alpha-masked PNG (whether or not any part of the image is actually masked out) will let you have non-transparent whites with no trouble.

Alternatively, you can just use near-white colors that look basically white to the eye but aren't actually. Some people have reported having trouble with Coldstone treating near-whites as being true-white, but again, I've never had that problem with my own graphics.

Quote

i noticed in the coldstone POG graphics that the game bar at the bottom has a pct underneath it solid white? wouldnt that be transparent also?

I'm not sure what you mean exactly about "a pct underneath it solid white", but the Map Interface part of the game interface is custom-masked by the Map Interface Mask, so it may not use the standard Coldstone methods of transparency.

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