While testing out some ship sprites in EVO, I'm getting strange problems when I rotate to the left of up (as in the bottom right frames on my sprite) where I get portions of the sprite blacked out (I turn and suddenly, wham, there's a gaping whole in the ship, or there's black lines running across it and stuff).

I don't see how this is a sprite problem, as it looks fine, and I've gone back and changed the mask to black and white and it still looks okay.

I was thinking the size of the sprite might be too big (I'm using 136x136 for one and 96x96 for another; both have this problem, though to varying degrees), but the Voinian Dreadnought is 120x120 and the Orion Galaxy Destroyer in EV Game Expander is 160x152 (what is the functional 6x6 sprite limit anyway?). So I don't see how this is too big.

I have 64 megs of RAM allocated to EVO; that's way more than enough (hmm, maybe I have too much allocated...).

So anyone got any ideas? I'd appreciate it if anyone can help me out on this one.

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Mike Lee (Firebird)

Are you sure the dimensions in the spďn resource match those of the PICTs? This sounds a lot like what happens when they don't. As for the memory allocation, what you've got should be plenty, and I don't think it's possible to have 'too much' memory assigned.

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David Arthur
(url="http://"http://davidarthur.evula.net/")davidarthur.evula.net(/url): MissionComputer and the Talon plug-in for the original Escape Velocity
(url="http://"http://www.ev-nova.net/")EV-Nova.net(/url): If You Haven't Visited Yet, Then Why Not?

Quote

Originally posted by David Arthur:
**Are you sure the dimensions in the spďn resource match those of the PICTs? This sounds a lot like what happens when they don't. As for the memory allocation, what you've got should be plenty, and I don't think it's possible to have 'too much' memory assigned.

**

Yeah, they match alright, unless somehow my clipboard scaled them down. Which I'm pretty sure the clipboard doesn't do.

I do remember, however, that there was supposed to be this one specific dimension, I think 88x88, that never worked right. Maybe that effect is happening on my stuff...

One thing I've thought of is that maybe the colors aren't quite black on some of the stuff, but then that should happen to the whole sprite and not just a few frames, and I've tested that my using the eyedropper on my sprite too. The behavior just doesn't match this type of problem.

But it might help to know that this is the same behavior as a size problem, I'll see if I can do anything with that bit of info, thanks.

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Mike Lee (Firebird)

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Originally posted by Firebird:
**While testing out some ship sprites in EVO, I'm getting strange problems when I rotate to the left of up (as in the bottom right frames on my sprite) where I get portions of the sprite blacked out (I turn and suddenly, wham, there's a gaping whole in the ship, or there's black lines running across it and stuff).
**

I had a similair problem once. I found by changing the sprite size to a power of two fixed it. Try rendering that 96x96 one at 128x128 or 120x120 and see it it will work.

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(url="http://"http://homepage.mac.com/thorprime")NovaBurst Home(/url)

Hmmm, I can't think of other possible problems as most of the replies had been answered, maybe I could figure out the problem myself if you sent a sample to me. I used to have this problem before when I first started to make ships for EVO.

prefectural@yahoo.com

This is still weird...thanks, Coraxus, for taking a look...basically, what he found was that my 96x96 ship was supposed to be 72x72 in the spin, and that worked. There are a few problems with this, however --

1. There are still holes in the ship.
2. The ship itself is grainier than it's supposed to be.
3. The graphic itself was made to be 96x96; I've checked this at least ten times already.

I have another sprite, which is 136x136 pixels, and that one doesn't work at any size I've tried (nothing between 112 and 144 seems to make it looks any nicer).

I guess I'll have to resort to changing the graphics to powers of two, just with lots of black space around them, but I'm still confused as to why this is refusing to work. If anyone else has any ideas (maybe the Windows version of Photoshop doesn't have a correct Mac 256-color color table, or standard screen resolution really isn't supposed to be 72, or what?), they'd be appreciated.

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Mike Lee (Firebird)

Can you screencapture the scene with the ship your having sprites problem with and post it here on the web board? I think it might help out more so people could recognize the problem quick and find the solution just as fast. What could also help is if you have the capability to do so, you can somehow post a link which downloads the sample but in a plug-in form, that way people can try out your ship plug-in so they can spot the problem right away.

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Bumper Sticker: My other ship is a piece of shi#&.

Quote

Originally posted by Firebird:
Yeah, they match alright, unless somehow my clipboard scaled them down. Which I'm pretty sure the clipboard doesn't do.

Actually, the clipboard can scale your graphics up and down. It does this if your image editor has for some reason declared them to be at a resolution other than 72 pixels per inch. It's fairly rare, but it has happened to me.

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David Arthur
(url="http://"http://davidarthur.evula.net/")davidarthur.evula.net(/url): MissionComputer and the Talon plug-in for the original Escape Velocity
(url="http://"http://www.ev-nova.net/")EV-Nova.net(/url): If You Haven't Visited Yet, Then Why Not?

Quote

Originally posted by David Arthur:
**Actually, the clipboard can scale your graphics up and down. It does this if your image editor has for some reason declared them to be at a resolution other than 72 pixels per inch. It's fairly rare, but it has happened to me.

**

Boy howdy!

I imported a whole navy worth of ships by copying and pasting from the resource fork of the original files. Then I went out into the galaxy and almost cried. Giant, jaggy blocks all over my shiny new hulls.

Turns out all the sprites had imported correctly, but all the masks were now 32x32. When I went through the clipboard instead the problem went away.

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You see a Grue.

First of all just remember that any number you type in the X and Y field that is NOT a multiple of 8 will and always poop out crap no matter what.

If you have a pict sprite in a clipboard that is 384 x 384 then the spin should be at most 64. If you have a pict sprite in a clipboard that is 144 x 144 then the spin should be at most 24. If you decide to shrink the size of the object only through the spin resource, then it should not cause a problem unless it's not a multiple of 8. That's how EVO manages to shrink weapons like rockets and missiles down to small sizes because when they rendered the objects, it was only through Infini-D which could only let them render down to at least 32 x 32. So when they filled out the spin field resource they may have typed in something like 16 or 24.

If you decide to enlarge the objects through the spin resource, you will end up stretching the quality thus producing that jaggedy pukey crap lines and stuff of which in this case it has become the largest number of mistakes plugin developers miss when they first learn to do spin resources.

Quote

Originally posted by Coraxus:
If you decide to enlarge the objects through the spin resource, you will end up stretching the quality thus producing that jaggedy pukey crap lines and stuff of which in this case it has become the largest number of mistakes plugin developers miss when they first learn to do spin resources.

Yeah, I'm quite aware of the 8-pixel thing; I learned that lesson a long, long time ago back when I was actually using EV-Edit (and the program was kind of new at that point too). As far as enlarging it goes, I'm not trying to enlarge it; it's just that on your computer the ship sprite appeared to be 72x72 whereas on mine it's 96x96.

I have a feeling David Arthur's right about this, though pasting into ClarisWorks reveals no problem. When I paste into GraphicConverter, however, it crashes. That could be related to the problem.

I'll investigate further, and I'm quite determined to squish this problem. I think it might have to do with the fact that I'm trying to do this stuff cross-platform, so maybe my PICT data is getting garbled and stuff.

Thanks for your help guys, I really hope I can use it to make my stuff work.

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Mike Lee (Firebird)