Hey, all.

I just recently turned my hand to using Coldstone, because of an interesting series of cooincedences, a request from a teacher, and a friend's wacky, far-out and possibly unworkable idea. But I won't bother you with all those small, niggly details.

Basically, my problem is (Yes, I have problem. Don't we all?) that I'm trying to replace the player's animation sequence. But Coldstone is not being tractable about this issue at all. In fact, it's being rather intractable.

I'm using the character sprites so generously provided by... Erm, someone or other. It doesn't say. (Please don't be mad at me for not acknowledging you, it's not intentional). I'm not gonna actually use these in my final version, but they're remarkably similar to what I want to use.

I split the thingies up into individual files, one for each facing, like it says in the game manual.
I made them .pct files, just like the tutorial's hero animation.
I ordered them the way the manual says to do it, north, east, south, west.
I put in the loop flags in where they're supposed to go.
I put the right link in the Game Options/Misc for the playery thing.
This is all right, I believe. However...

My character is completely and totally invisble. That is to say, I can't see him. He doesn't show up. The game still registers him as being a 4-directional animation, and he still bumps into stuff, but you can't see him at all.
Needless to say, it's enough to make me just slightly teed off. In fact, it makes me want to attack my computer with a large hammer, but I'm rafraining from that beause I got a nice new shiny Imac and I don't want to ruin it, yet. But violence is becoming an increasingly viable option in my mind.

Please, what is it that I'm doing wrong? This whole invisble player thing is getting in the way of me tackling much more stupid, irrational and hard-to-do things, like implementing something that looks vaguely like a turn-based combat system. Any help would be appreciated to a unbelievably humongous extent. I might worship your toenails, in fact. That's how much I would appreciate it.
Thanks in advance...

Service With A Smile :),
Scifiteki

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"If you keep your mind sufficiently open, people will throw a lot of rubbish into it."
William A. Orton

Hmm... Check the layer ordering in your map. It may be that you've somehow managed to have everything in your map layered "on top" of the player, and that's why you can't see him. Though, if you're using tiles, this is unlikely, as tiles are always in the very bottom of the layer order.

Let's try some other troubleshooting:

Are NPCs on this map visible or invisible?
If they're visible, what happens if you give one of them the player animation? Is it still visible?
Are there still problems if you use a different animation for the player?
What about if you send the player to a different map?

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I don't know what I'm talking about.
(url="http://"http://homepage.mac.com/glennfield/ColdstoneBugs.html")Coldstone 1.0.1 Bug List(/url) - last update 10/10/2002

Edit: sorry, just realised my post was totally useless.
My apologies.
Migraine

(This message has been edited by Migraine (edited 11-04-2002).)

Sounds like the pictures aren't 16 bit. If you are using the add-on nintendo-like images, when you cut-up and convert, they end up 8 bit. Use graphic converter or whatever to force them to be 16 bit. And I don't care what the manual says, 8 bit images show up as invisible or with funky tranverse lines.

Apollo16

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Hey, you're right! Thanks, Apollo. Now, I can free up my time to get annoyed at other things! Yayness! That is quite evil, though. Oh well, I've learned my lesson. I'll have to memorise all of Coldstone's wacky bugs off by heart, like I should have done many weeks before.

Service With A Smile :),
Scifiteki

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"If you keep your mind sufficiently open, people will throw a lot of rubbish into it."
William A. Orton

Ahem. Nearly forgot, for a second.

<Worships Apollo's toenails, with feeling!>

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"If you keep your mind sufficiently open, people will throw a lot of rubbish into it."
William A. Orton

You are welcome.

Apollo16

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I'll post this here in case someone referrences this later for Help...but another cause of invisble chracter itis occurrs when you accidentally set the image print size to the dimensions you want, this can prove to be wuite undetectible especially since in the animation editor and other softwares your image will appear at the dimensions you provided in program you formatted to

specifically PhotoShop and despite what you might try copying it from one format to another, changing the file type manually this will not work the reason eing because Print means more than you commonly think print means with no modern attachments output and for those of you who may have dabbled in code before arriving here you may now palm slap yourself in the forehead, the only remedy is to a) remember the dimensions to which you set the print option to and b)reformat all affected files. at which point you'll need to resize the actual image and not its display size.

This happened to me and nearly derailed an entire portion of my game...

(This message has been edited by ellrx (edited 11-05-2002).)

Uhuhhehehe...

Well, you were almost right, Apollo.
NOTE TO EVERYONE WHO MIGHT BE IN MY POSITION:
Coldstone does not, in fact, support pict files for animations. At all. The manual might say otherwise, but it's a snidy little lying thing, and I wouldn't trust it's claims of support for just about anything until I'd checked them crossways. Pict files will load in the animation viewer, but not in the game. You'll need .PNG files for that.

But the SNESlike character sprites look really nifity, ingame. : )

Service With A Smile: ),
Scifiteki

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"If you keep your mind sufficiently open, people will throw a lot of rubbish into it."
William A. Orton

Quote

Originally posted by Scifiteki:
**NOTE TO EVERYONE WHO MIGHT BE IN MY POSITION:
Coldstone does not, in fact, support pict files for animations. At all. **

Er, wrong. I currently have over a dozen character animations composed entirely of PICT files, and they work just fine in-game. If you're having problems creating an animation that uses them, I can only guess that you're doing something wrong.

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I don't know what I'm talking about.
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Quote

Originally posted by Scifiteki:
~snip~

As Glenn mentioned, the PICT format works just fine under Coldstone. I also have several in my projects that work just fine.

You might want to check though to see if your pictures have a .pict or a .pct extension. Under CGE 1.0 only .pct extensions were recognized. I'm not sure if this was "fixed" in 1.0.1 or not, but I would hazard a guess that you still need to remove the i and make your extensions simply .pct.

And then the obvious 16-bit / 72dpi...

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.pict does work under 1.0.1 just like it used to many moons ago
(strangely beenox took out many features hen added them back, which is why some featurees have yet to be completed--they're going in circles)

I don't recall the manual lying it asks you to use the .pct extension. but honestly if you've switched to pngs your better off(for chracters, and other elements that don't benefit from simple white masking), they're slower in the animation editor but work fine in game.

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(*)(URL=http://www.geocities.com/ellrx/index.html)I shot the sheriff, the deputy, the head of bank treasury. Some mounties in the ounty got a big bounty stressin' me.

Quote

Originally posted by ellrx:
**.pict does work under 1.0.1 just like it used to many moons ago
(strangely beenox took out many features hen added them back, which is why some featurees have yet to be completed--they're going in circles)

I don't recall the manual lying it asks you to use the .pct extension. but honestly if you've switched to pngs your better off(for chracters, and other elements that don't benefit from simple white masking), they're slower in the animation editor but work fine in game.

**

I did a bit of experimenting in 1.0 after a failure with PICT images. I found two distinct places where a particular suffix was required for a graphic. Oddly, the format of said suffix was different in each. One would only accept, seemingly, 3 places and lower case, the other required four places and was not case sensitive. It made it "interesting" to figure out just what worked and how well. :frown: I am glad to hear 1.01 has improved on this.

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"I know the stranger's name."
Turandot

I guess i never noticed mainly because the only versions i've ever used custom art for were the ancient b5 and now 1.0.1 everything else was either unstable but definitely not worth my effort, until...1.0.1

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(list)
(*)(URL=http://www.geocities.com/ellrx/index.html)I shot the sheriff, the deputy, the head of bank treasury. Some mounties in the ounty got a big bounty stressin' me.