What are the benefits/problems of using one or the other? Does it make much of a difference?
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The main problem with PICTs in Nova is that they aren't nearly as nicely implemented or documented for ships as the RLe files. Not that they don't work just as well, because I've tried 'em and they work fine. But getting them to work...that took some doing. It isn't very clear what the ID#s of the spins, masks, and sprites should be for ships.
I don't know, it just seems like a hassle that's avoidable by using the RLe-type graphics.
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(url="http://"http://mailto:ckey@integraonline.com") - () () / }{ - (/url)
where...
...am I? -
onyx.correctness = true; RLe > PICT
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"A taco is merely a rigid, deformed tortilla."
- Thomas Castiglione
"There will be MUCH CRUSHING!"
- Pink -
From what I have seen the only major benifit to using RLe files is that you can make both an eight bit and sixteen bit graphic for each ship. Since you still have to set up your picts, and get the IDs right, and make a shan with all the engine glow and other Nova eyecandy set up right before you can even feed it into EnRLe to make it into an RLe pair, you don't save any time or complexity when it is all over. Also, if you are replacing a built in ship, you "have" to use RleD/Rle8's or else the built in graphics will not be overridden.
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Originally posted by Dahak:
**What are the benefits/problems of using one or the other? Does it make much of a difference?
**Nova would crash every time I tried to use a PICT of a planet or ship. I had to figure out how to convert PICTs to the rle8/rleD. Since I did that I have had no problems.
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Never settle with words what you can accomplish with a flame thrower. -
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Originally posted by Cafall:
**In addition to all the other benefits of the RLE file format, RLE sprites probably save hard disk space.**
EV Nova converts PICT sprites to RLE format at runtime, since RLE sprites save memory and can be drawn easier. So, it will end up working the same, but will take longer to load.
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"If it's not on fire, it's a software problem." -
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Originally posted by cOMMANDo:
how do you convert picts in to RLE format? never even heard of RLE...RLE is a Nova-specific graphics format. You can convert PICT sprites to RLE using EnRLE, available from (url="http://"http://homepage.mac.com/dr_ralph/")Dr Ralph's site(/url).
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David Arthur
(url="http://"http://davidarthur.evula.net/")davidarthur.evula.net(/url): MissionComputer and the Talon plug-in
(url="http://"http://www.ev-nova.net/")EV-Nova.net(/url): Forums / Classifieds / Upcoming Plug-ins / More -
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Originally posted by Dahak:
**I see. Best I convert then. But if you are debugging/testing a plug-in would it be better to leave them as PICT until the end? That way you save time encoding and decoding.**
In theory, yes. Put using PICTs instead of RLE's can lead to more problems than it's worth sometimes.
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(url="http://"http://homepage.mac.com/thorprime")NovaBurst Home(/url) -
I've had some success using picts, but not much; Nova habitually crashes when I try to feed it a pict-based ship; so far the problems have always gone away upon conversion to RLE format. And, in the one case I've dealt w/ so far where the images were large enough to matter, RLE (even with RleD and Rle8 together) produced a smaller file than picts did.
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