OHRRGPCE Graphics and Animations dev blog

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TMC
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OHRRGPCE Graphics and Animations dev blog

Post by TMC »

So my last dev blog petered out, not because my work on the OHRRPGCE slowed down, but because I went off the rails and stopped working on important stuff people would be very interested in, which was the whole purpose of the thread: to encourage myself to stick to what I claimed was high priority by putting what I was doing in public view. Yeah, well.

So, this time around I'm just going to have a mostly single-topic thread: the new graphics and animations system. Anyone else working on it could also post updates :)

I'm going to post way less text, more screenshots. That implies fewer updates when there's nothing to see.

Here's what the new spriteset editor looks like so far:
Image
You can't do anything yet except edit frames.

This is displaying and editing graphics stored in the new graphics file format, rgfx! You might have heard us say repeatedly that we couldn't increase sprite size, etc, until we replaced the old graphics file format, and we couldn't do that until the spriteset browser/editor had been replaced.
The sprite editor itself was updated a year or two ago, the spriteset browser was the final piece.
Last edited by TMC on Sat Feb 03, 2018 4:19 am, edited 3 times in total.
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Bob the Hamster
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Post by Bob the Hamster »

Eeee! :D I am excited about this.

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Post by Billiard »

You will be remembered forever for the gifts you bring to us.
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Post by SwordPlay »

That looks so nifty!

+eternal gratitude
Last edited by SwordPlay on Sun Feb 04, 2018 1:46 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by TMC »

<fanfaronade> I just made the 10,000th set of changes to the OHRRPGCE's source code repository: </fanfaronade>
Switch to rgfx for sprites and backdrops, and to new spriteset and backdrop editors!

That means that backdrops can now be any size.
Up soon, adjustable sprite sizes and number of frames, 8-bit sprites,
and the new animation system.

The old .pt# and .mxs lumps are not yet deleted on upgrade. Tilesets are still
stored in the MXS format, so the old backdrop/tileset import/export menu is
still needed.

Bumped the CURRENT_RPG_VERSION to 21.
Added reloading of .rgfx lumps while live previewing.

The combined enemy graphics editor isn't exposed yet, because default palettes
aren't correctly handled yet.

git-svn-id: https://rpg.hamsterrepublic.com/source/wip@10000 7d344553-34f0-0310-a9b1-970ce8f1c3a2
Combined enemy graphics editor?
Image

I actually already posted screenshots of the new backdrop import menu a year ago, so I'm just going to repost:
Image
(This backdrop is by Fenrir. He uploaded a different version of it as free to use graphics, not sure about this. Custom master palette to make it look good :P)

Considering that there are various annoying glitches and missing features and possibly nasty bugs in the new spriteset editor, I don't recommend you rush out to download a nightly. (I did spend much of today testing it though... and squashing numerous bugs)

Yesterday I livestreamed a couple hours of working on the spriteset editor as a test. Next time, I'll change the format, make it more interesting, and post a recording somewhere.
Last edited by TMC on Sun Feb 04, 2018 7:44 pm, edited 4 times in total.
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Post by TMC »

Off-topic.

<img src="http://tmc.castleparadox.com/pics/ohrbl ... colors.gif" width="640">

Note the unselectable items.

(Not in nightly builds yet)
Last edited by TMC on Sat Mar 31, 2018 11:11 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by The Wobbler »

Love it!
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Post by Pepsi Ranger »

Ah, finally. I've been waiting for this. Thank you for putting this one together.
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Post by FnrrfYgmSchnish »

Actually-unselectable titles/dividers/decorations/etc. in menus! Great to see that those are a thing now.
FYS:AHS -- Working on Yagziknian NPC walkabout sprites
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Post by TMC »

All that (and much more, less interesting menu stuff) was but a horrible distraction, begun when Feenick complained that "menuspecial:sound volume" was missing. Long overdue though.

Actually on-topic:

You can now import PNG and JPEG images (since a month or so ago - You could import them as backdrops well before that). I haven't added options to export sprites and screenshots in BMP/PNG/GIF yet, but there will be will that too.

You can now import/export whole spritesets again (since a few days ago, but better use the current nightly; earlier ones had some terrible bugs).
Last edited by TMC on Sun Apr 01, 2018 8:53 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by FyreWulff »

Does that actually store them as PNG in the game itself or just still convert it to BMP for actual storage? Because that'd massively shrink Jade's size if so.
Last edited by FyreWulff on Sun Apr 01, 2018 2:59 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by TMC »

It decompresses them to bitmaps, though I am planning on allowing storing graphics as pngs too.
However, you would be surprised, using pngs would actually increase the size of the game when the whole game is zipped up. Especially if you have backdrops, tilesets or spritesets which are variants of each other, compressing them as separate files is a big loss, the PNG overhead for a single walkabout or enemy graphic is a lot, and in my tests PNG compression is often worse than just zipping a bmp file even for a single image!
Last edited by TMC on Mon Apr 02, 2018 1:05 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by FyreWulff »

Oh yeah, I just remembered the bitmaps would be palletized which is a huge savings on storage.
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Post by TMC »

I also compared the amount of compression PNG achieves for paletted and unpaletted (24 bit) images.
PNG has a bunch of different filters/prediction methods it uses to help compress 24 bit images. They aren't used for paletted images; so IIRC for paletted images PNG is very similar to just zipping a bitmap (it uses zlib (DEFLATE)). For truecolor images, because it's doing lossless compression it actually can't achieve terribly much compression of natural or many synthetic images (eg screenshots of games which have lighting systems), because they have a lot of noise; it can't compare with lossy compression like JPEG. IIRC truecolor line art or pixel art is where it compares best... provide it has more than 256 colors, otherwise palettizing it is much better.
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Post by 0ion9 »

Wow, this is nice to see, TMC. Last time I got involved in the discussion of overhauling the graphic storage, all the details that came up needing to be managed seemed pretty overwhelming.

I notice in your screenshot of the combined enemy gfx editor, there is a white line in the top right. Is that a visual glitch?

Regarding PNG, delta filter 5 seems very good for drawings (and presumably CG when it is relatively full of smooth blends). I've tested on a lot of images and settled on:

Code: Select all

optipng -o 1 -zc 1 -zm 8 -zs 2 -f 5
(-zc,-zm,-zs are zlib parameters, -f selects PNG delta filter. -o is OptiPNG specific and not really relevant here)

Still definitely doesn't compare to JPG very well, but one interesting thing here is "-zc 1" achieving better filesize than higher compression settings.
Last edited by 0ion9 on Sun Apr 08, 2018 1:24 am, edited 1 time in total.
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