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Originally posted by Skyblade86:
I guess what I meant to say in my first post is how to do the compositing of the sprites / masks and what exactly I need to render to make the sprites complete. From what I can tell, it looks like I need at least two different sprites with the ship banking slightly to the left and right (maybe 10° or so) in addition to the standard level-based sprite. Then there's the engine graphics... that's what confuses me. I'm guessing I need to render several different sprites with a jet black surface applied to the ship animation and only the engine flames visible (and by several different sprites for the engines, I mean alternating the brightness and depth of the flame in each)?
For banking sprites, you make a long animation. For a ship with 36 frame rotation, you render the first 36 frames with the ship rotating level, the next 36 frames with the ship banked to the left, and 36 frames with the ship banked to the right. All in one animation. Run that through m2v, and you've got that made. The brightness of the glows based on how hard your engines are thrusting is controlled by the game itself, so you don't need to render anything but the brightest engine glow.
For engine glows, you make the ship totally black, and you make the glows visible. This way if any part of the glow is supposed to pass behind the ship, it will be correctly hidden. If your ship has banking sprites, you render the glows the same way.
Same with weapon glows.
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**Oh yeah, then the really cool flashing lights... and what about those ships such as the Leviathan and Auroran Cruiser that have sections that move about the ship?
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The flashing lights are very simple. Put colored balls with glows where you want the lights to go (make sure that the balls are somewhat large so they're visible), and render them on a black ship. Similar to the engine glows. The blinking of the lights are controlled in the shän resource.
There are two ways of making animated sprites, and it all depends on what you want the ship to do. One way is to render the animation at the same time as the rest of the ship (Leviathan). You do 36 frames (or whatever number of ship rotation frames you have) of the animated bit in each position. That sounded funny. You render the ship rotating 350°, then move the animated piece to its next position, rotate, move, rotate, move, until you loop back.
The other way to use the "alt sprites." This technique is used on the Thunderforge. Since the ThForge's gravity section is basically a rotating cylinder, they rendered the ship with the rotating section black. Render this through the rotation once. The cylinder is rendered with the ship black and the drum visible. This is rendered similar to the technique above. I suppose that this technique is used when the ship in question is large compared to the animated section, and the animated section is in the direct center. That way, you don't have a huge sprite, just a large one for the ship, and a sequence of smaller ones for the animation.
For the shäns. There is really only one thing that is confusing. On top of having a Main Sprite and Mask ID, and Main Sprite and Mask size, there are two fields labeled "FrameSetCount," and "BaseSetCount." (or something like that). FrameSetCount is the number of frames it takes for the ship to rotate 350° (for a 36 frame rotation). BaseSetCount is the number of sets of frames. Therefore, if you had 36 frame rotation with a banking ship, your FrameSetCount would be 36, and your BaseSetCount would be 3, because there are three sets of 36 frames (level, left, right = 3). For an animated sprite, FrameSetCount would be 36, and BaseSetCount would be the number of frames in the animation if the ship were pointed in one direction.
I think that should be it, so I hope this cleared up your questions.
Matrix
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