Nestix: Graphics

[JS Lemming]

It would probably be best to divide once again. Who knows, we might end of with a music topic and a design topic as well.

[Falco Girgis]

I sorta consider the original the "Design" topic, but yeah, I could see a sound one being started in here, and we already have us a programming one in t3h programming forum.

[Falco Girgis]

How's the overworld template going also?

[JS Lemming]

Overworld template? I haven't even been thinking about it. Would it not be wise if we make a simple top down view design first? Like of the entire hang area. Then we can make a template of the actuall 3d-ish roomz. How else would you do it without knowing where doors and such would be.

[Falco Girgis]

Yep yep, good idea.

[MarauderIIC]

Do we have to do sheets? Wouldn't it be faster (since you don't have to cut images out of a sheet), easier (since you can change stuff) and more organized if we did things such as /player/walk/frame1.png /player/walk/frame2.png ?

[Falco Girgis]

Yeah, I guess that we could do that. JSL doesn't want to though... To tell you the truth, I don't really care. :?

What do you think, JSL?

[Falco Girgis]

Assuming that we're doing it JSL's way, how would we do Gemini Man's stage from MegaMan 3?

It is like a disco or something, all of the tiles are animated and flash pretty colors... Would that go onto the main level sheet, or its own seperate "whatever_tile_sheet.png"?

[JS Lemming]

Stick with sheets people, you will hate yourself if you do otherwise. (heh, my editor is designed for sheets )

Dang, I never thought about the Gemini Man's stage. But it is do-able. It will require us to design the sheet so that the program can actually change the data of the level durring game play to iterate through the the same tiles (but with different colors). Hmm. How many different colors are we talking about?

[Falco Girgis]

It seems like everything in that stage has a good 3 frames of animation (backgrounds, tiles, etc.)


It's got a red, blue, and sorta brown yellow.

[Falco Girgis]

Slan45, how's that character coming?

[MarauderIIC]

I'm confused. Why would we hate ourselves for having an organized, easily editable directory structure instead of a hard-defined size of an image in a spritesheet?

Do you know what that would cost!?! We would have to type in the load image function like a bazzion times!! If you are worried about the splicing of a sheet, don't be. I can handle that. Plus, you would only load a sheet like once a level, which would not kill processing time yo.

No.. you wouldn't. At least, not any more than you would have to tell it to splice. The spritesheets don't allow us flexibility, and there's no big bonus to doing a sheet, that I can see, whereas if we do separate images we can easily change one frame w/o having to recode the splice, and since the size is autodetected (at least, in OpenGL. SDL should be no different), I don't see why we should do it a potentially aggravating way.

You could also easily add frames, doing something like this:

Code: Select all

class Player {
    vector<Texture*>frames;
// ...
};

class Texture {
    string imageFile;
// ....
};

/players/walk.dat:

Code: Select all

/players/frames/one.png
/players/frames/two.png
/players/frames/three.png
/players/frames/oopsiwantanotherframe.png
/players/frames/four.png

Which you can't do as easily with a sheet, since everything in a sheet is locked in place.

[Falco Girgis]

I'm just going with whatever...

Mar, JSL, what about enemies?

[JS Lemming]

When you talk of flexibility, do you mean having to add a sprite into a sheet as being difficult or adding in a sprite during program run? I don't see how you could possibly think a million seperate images is better then WELL ORGANIZED sheets....

Also, we would only need 1 splicing function!

[Guest]

I am clueless....

Lets say the below is terrain:

Code: Select all

 _
/=\

and you wanted it bigger:

Code: Select all

 _____
/=====\

It would just be a matter of using multiple of the middle square on a split sheet, but using several images in a directory, how would you do that? Would you just save the big one and the small one as differnt imges? If so, wouldn't that make the size of the game HUGE?

But, as already said, it would be much easier using organized directories than a split sheet when making the charactor, wouldn't it?

So I dunno, which should we use? Do we like, vote? O.o
Should we add a poll to this topic for 5 days?