Can I prevent it?

Attached to this topic is a small cutout from a Dark Swarm screenshot. A few of the ships sport these black spots, such as you see here. This one is far the worst, covering almost the entire ship.
It only shows up when the engine glow is activated.
Any idea what causes this and how to prevent it from happening?

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I've seen it... I think that it has to do with a problem with the mask when you spin for the engine glow sprite. I re-did some of my flares and it corrected my version of this problem.

That's it exactly -- EnRLE has difficulty with masking large areas of one color. If you just add a little bit of noise to the glow graphic -- not enough to notice, but enough to fool EnRLE -- that should fix it.

Hm I'll try, but it seems curious. In fact the color is actually varying between different shades of blue. And this only happens in the game. If I look at it in ResEdit, everything looks fine. So it seems to be a problem of the game, not EnRLE.

EDIT: Sigh doing it kinda hurts me, but it works. Thanks, guys.

This post has been edited by Arion : 21 January 2005 - 02:50 PM

Check your mask. Unless the white area is COMPLETELY white it wont work. You need to make sure there isnt a small VERY light bit of colour or shade in there somewhere.

Nova doesn't like it if additive sprites (such as engine glows) have any completely black pixels within the mask. The way I handle it: save the image into a ResEdit document, then BlitZen to 16-bit color (the dithering may reassign some pixels that were not black to be black), then copy that image back into Photoshop and then apply Threshold with a value of 1.

I think ATMOS didn't want to bother with that so they added a slight (nearly imperceptible) value to all the additive sprites so none of the pixels would ever be completely black, so the exact precision of the mask doesn't matter.

Jules, on Jan 22 2005, 02:12 PM, said:

Check your mask. Unless the white area is COMPLETELY white it wont work. You need to make sure there isnt a small VERY light bit of colour or shade in there somewhere.
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If you run the sprites through P2S, the mask image is always 1-bit- there will be no color information produced.

I'm gonna go for the same thing Weep mentions above. I had it a couple of times with some of the Aftermath creft I've been working on.

on another note, p2s/m2s = poop

In fact I still use Make spďn 2.0.
It's fast, it's simple and it works. And it, too, produces only 2-color masks.