Wishlist thing

[sotrain515]

Just wondering what the likelihood is on ever getting more "art" slices like the rect and ellipse. In particular a line slice (that draws a line from bottom left to top right or vice versa) and a triangle slice (could even be the same slice-type just with fill turned on).

[TMC]

I actually implemented line slices a couple months ago, but decided to keep them hidden because I wasn't certain about the way they worked. It doesn't look like we're going to change anything, so I've reenabled them and added some (untested!) script commands for them. Get them in the next nightly!

I also wanted to add a polyline slice which draws multiple line segments, either straight lines, or smoothed into a bezier curve. See, if you want to draw multiple lines which join end to end and which are more than 1 pixel wide (not implemented yet), then it's tricky to make the ends join correctly (see this) and they need to be drawn together rather than as separate slices.
It could be possible to 'fill' a polyline, to let you draw polygons and other shapes, but if we're going down that route it might be easier and more powerful to instead have a way to draw triangles or squares with per-vertex colors or textured by a sprite. I mean, what do you want to draw solid-color triangles for? I can't think of too many uses, but I can think of lots of uses of drawing a sprite distorted or in perspective (eg walls in first-person dungeon crawlers)

[sotrain515]

Thanks!

The reason I am looking for line and triangle slices is to make "art" that can be scaled. Right now, I can make slice collections consisting of rects and ellipses (and maybe other things) that can then be loaded up and easily shrink or grow just by looping through all the pieces and applying a modifier to the width and height.

If sprites could grow/shrink then that would be even more up my alley but I figured line/triangle slices would be far simpler.

[sheamkennedy]

If sprites could grow/shrink then that would be even more up my alley...

Technically you can make a slice grow/shrink without cycling through many instances of the slice but I'm not sure if this method suits your needs. I've done something similar before and it had some fun results.

You can use "dissolve sprite (handle, dissolve type, total ticks, start tick, backwards, automatic)" and use the dissolve type "shrink." This is the same shrink animation that's used in the battle death animation. This function allows you to display the sprite at any given moment of it's shrink animation so long as "automatic" is set to false. Thus to use this you will want to create the largest possible oval (or other shape) and use this command to shrink it down from the largest size to the smallest. Notice you can also use squeeze and squash dissolve types to shrink along only one axis at a time. These animations wouldn't work with lines nicely as single pixel lines when shrunk might display no pixels this is more useful for filled in shapes or art assets.

[sotrain515]

Thanks, I hadn't even considered that. Definitely bears looking into.

[TMC]

People use that trick heavily; we should really add a dedicated command for scaling/rotating a sprite.