OHRRGPCE Graphics and Animations dev blog

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TMC
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Post by TMC »

Yes, changing the graphics format and especially implementing an animation system has been far more work than I expected, even given ~10 years to think about it and foresee the hurdles! There are still many things which I haven't decided, for example where the boundary should be between the sprite animation system and definitions of attack/enemy/hero attacking animations/movement patterns - should there be an animation opcode to move a sprite by X pixels? Or should you just be forced to create a "lunge" animation either by making your sprites large so they can contain that range of movement, or should you customise the hero movement pattern (eg Dash In) to achieve it? Should animations be able to spawn other sprites, as particle effects such as sparks? And so on - I have probably dozens of unanswered questions. I've been meaning to send some emails about things like this to the dev mailing list - I have a lot of half-written emails.

I don't see a white line at the top right of that screenshot. You're not talking about the scroll bar, are you?

(Unfortunately the combined enemy graphics editor still isn't exposed...)

I haven't used optipng before. I was comparing with pngcrush. The library I'm using for PNG encode/decode, LodePNG, allows finegrained control of PNG filters and zlib parameters. Surprisingly pngcrush usually failed compress the files produced by LodePNG significantly, even when I wrote them with default rather than max compression, so it seems it's not so great afterall. (For example, it doesn't seem to reduce the bitdepth of an 8 bit paletted PNG that uses < 16 colours)
Last edited by TMC on Sun Apr 08, 2018 2:48 pm, edited 1 time in total.
0ion9
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Post by 0ion9 »

TMC wrote: I don't see a white line at the top right of that screenshot. You're not talking about the scroll bar, are you?
Possibly. I don't actually use OHRRPGCE anymore, so it might well just be something ordinary that I don't recognize.
I haven't used optipng before. I was comparing with pngcrush. ... (For example, it doesn't seem to reduce the bitdepth of an 8 bit paletted PNG that uses < 16 colours)
I wasn't very happy with pngcrush, but IIRC that was because it doesn't behave very much like a civilized *nix program.

A quick test with optipng verifies that it DOES reduce bitdepth ( I painted 4 colors onto an image, saved as RGB, and ran optipng on it. I tried saving as Indexed, but realized GIMP had already done the correct thing, so optimization had no further effect).
TMC
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Post by TMC »

*Blows off dust*
Here's something on-topic.
A long time ago someone (guo?) requested better minimaps, and naturally I jumped on it immediately... but never quite finished, and let it languish for a year or two. The feature is finally done and in recent nightly builds. You can pick the algorithm to generate minimaps from three alternatives.

Before (random pixels):
<img width="640" src="http://tmc.castleparadox.com/pics/ohrbl ... random.png">

The new default (smooth scaling):
<img width="640" src="http://tmc.castleparadox.com/pics/ohrbl ... smooth.png">

A third option, which is less blurry (most common color):
<img width="640" src="http://tmc.castleparadox.com/pics/ohrbl ... common.png">

But the part that really motivated me to work on this is previewing maps, since I often inspect other people's games, and don't know my way around:
<img width="640" src="http://tmc.castleparadox.com/pics/ohrblog/14_maps.gif">
Last edited by TMC on Sat Sep 08, 2018 7:41 am, edited 1 time in total.
TMC
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Post by TMC »

Something else I added recently (and not very on-topic) is the ability to record a combined .gif of playing and editing a game. I added that so that I could show off improvements to Test Game. What I'm wondering is, does anyone have any other use for it? If not, maybe should just hide the option to record them...

Image

(Note: if you try this out in nightly builds currently the recording shows lots of flickering and possibly garbage because it doesn't synchronise properly; I haven't uploaded the fixes to that yet)
Last edited by TMC on Sat Sep 08, 2018 7:42 am, edited 4 times in total.
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kylekrack
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Post by kylekrack »

Recording test game and custom simultaneously looks like a good way to report bugs/ask for help when something funky is going on. Or it could just be another fun way to show off development.

And the minimaps looks incredible, especially compared to the old algorithm. Those Vikings maps look great.
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TMC
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Post by TMC »

I fine tuned the "most common color" algorithm largely while looking at that map (and some others) in Vikings, so the parameters might be slightly suboptimal for other maps. There are some maps for which that algorithm produces poor results, sometimes regardless of the parameters. The smooth scaling one also tends to produce blurry maps. Hmm... I could put the minimap through a sharpening filter to counter that...
Oh, that reminds me that I wanted to add an option to set the minimap for a map to a background sprite. It'll be really easy to implement.
Last edited by TMC on Sun Sep 09, 2018 11:41 am, edited 1 time in total.
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