Why Spin Graphics?

My roommate, upon entering my room last night caught me making spin graphics for a new ship with my Mac emulator.

(Just so you know, folks, I do it the old-school way, and hand-rotate it, because I use Photoshop CS on my Windows laptop, and then copy the pict file I create into the emulator, open it in GifConverter, select it, copy it, and paste it into the PICT resource in my plugin in ResEdit.)

He had the audacity to question the logic and supreme genius of our lord and master, Matt Burch. The question he asked me was this: "Why spin graphics? Why not just take one image, and rotate it? I'm pretty sure that would have been easier, and easier to code, too."

Is he crazy? I need some backup here. I explained it to him for Override and Nova (the ship animations kinda need spin graphics, no?), but I'm not sure that EVC can handle animations (blinking lights, opening bay doors, etc.). Any ideas as to why Matt chose spin graphics?

Thanks all!

P.S. - I also posted this in the Developer's Board, so if you mod guys wish to delete it from here, feel free. I just figured I'd ask some of the EV regulars, some of whom have plugin experience. Thanks again.

Allow me:

Wait...

No idea.

Probably 'cause, when you rotate, you lose some information. Moreover, it's not easy to do (unless you use some graphics lib that would slow stuff down), and when you do it, it's usually not fast.

One last thing: this would render any lighting or rotating solar panel effect completely impossible.

Also, I know in Nova at least you aren't looking straight down at the ship. If you were, you could just rotate the ship, but since it's from an angle you kinda need to render each frame separately.

Andcarne, on May 12 2005, 04:53 PM, said:

Also, I know in Nova at least you aren't looking straight down at the ship. If you were, you could just rotate the ship, but since it's from an angle you kinda need to render each frame separately.
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Well, you could make a straight down plug-in ship for EVN if you wanted.

I vote that when EV was being developed that computing power was too crappy to handle spinning the graphic on the fly.

Most of the other Ambrosia games of the EV era have graphics like that too.

From an artistic point of view it gives you way more flexibility than just rotating the sprite on the spot. In EV you have ship sprites made from rendered polygon models with textures and a fixed light source (ever notice the shadows on the ships when playing?). Old computers couldn't render 3d as fast as today so you sometimes had to create pre-renderd sprites.

This means that you may create the impression that light shines and casts a shadow on the ship from the same direction all the time while it's rotating. It's a subtle effect but it does a lot for the game atmosphere.

Another thing I've noticed in some plug-ins is that the graphic artist rotates only a small portion of a ship, or animates certain parts, making the ship look more alive than a static sprite that is rotated in Photoshop.

Cool, thanks guys. I got the replies from the dev board sooner...but thanks!

My roommate accepts defeat.

Yeah, the spin is far more versatile. Also, I believe that the graphics package was not written by Matt Burch himself, but from one of those public library things. Correct me if I'm wrong.

xak - yeah, I think you're right about that public library thing. I remember hearing of that before...

Okay, so...just out of curiosity, is there any spinning program out there for Windows that anyone knows about?

Dash_Merc, on May 12 2005, 08:59 AM, said:

He had the audacity to question the logic and supreme genius of our lord and master, Matt Burch. The question he asked me was this: "Why spin graphics? Why not just take one image, and rotate it? I'm pretty sure that would have been easier, and easier to code, too."

It would look awful. EV and EVO were not rendered by making one ship graphic and rotating it. They were created using Infini-D models, where the images were taken from different camera angles. Light was applied to the surface of the models, giving it unique graphics in each shot.

If you took the pic 19 and flipped it upside, it would not look like pic 1.

Yeah, I got that, and I explained it, and it made sense.

Would you happen to know of a spin generator for PC that would work with Anim8or?

You might want to try the EVDC for questions about spin generators.