Zotged's Forum Posts

  • We're getting a bit offtopic here but hey, at least we're talking about animation frames.

    Definitely automated tweening has its disadvantages, I'm more than aware of that. Point being I haven't had any real tests yet. If I have a one second animation consisting of 15 keys I don't think it would look that bad if there was another 15 tweens making it look smooth even though half of the frames wouldn't have the same kind of quality. I'm not talking about taking that kind of animating shortcuts as I tend to have a lot of handdrawn keys.

    Taking this project's overall looks into consideration it could look very cool to have morphed tweens there too since there is no way I'm animating 60 frames per second by hand. I'm okay between 12-18 keys per second. Professional handdrawn animation in cartoons and anime generally tends to have 12 animation frames per second (which is naturally every other frame of a broadcast fps video file), maybe the full 24 frames in fast scenes.

    <img src="http://img7.imageshack.us/img7/8183/tracedkeys1.png">

    Here's an example of the said keys. It's a simple fast animation but the problem lies in making it look smooth in a very detailed environment that has a lot of prerendered materials. If it's played fast enough to make it look smooth it's simply too fast and doesn't look natural. If it's played too slowly it stands out. Morphed keys could easily fix this by providing more sense of motion in the animation between the keys.

    I put an overlapped "onion skin" version of the animation and I don't think that it would be reasonable to have full drawn production quality animation frames more than that on a character sprite.

    Edit: Killed a typo

    Edit 2: Oh and as a reply to madster's hint on trying Premiere... We don't exactly boast a budget that would allow us to buy a 1000� piece of software for animation tweens. Thanks for the heads up though :D

  • Call this the Christmas present to the community.

    <img src="http://planar-studios.com/img/24720.PNG">

    Edit: Do note that it's 720p, the forum clips most of it

  • I don't really recommend Construct for pixel art styled games for its high resource demands and I find the runtime a bit of an overkill for low resolution graphics.

    Then again I recommend learning pixel art more than anything for game graphics artists. There are many active communities of pixel artists filled with tutorials.

    A few sites you might want to take a look at:

    http://www.pixeljoint.com/

    http://www.wayofthepixel.net/

    Also:

    http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=c ... +tutorials

    Edit: Fixed a minor typo. A few more sites:

    http://www.tigsource.com/ - the home of many indie game developers

    http://www.natomic.com/hosted/marks/mpat/index.html - I remember using this tutorial years ago myself. Has a very down to earth look at the fundamentals of pixel art.

    Sadly many great sites and tutorials seem to have died. archive.org could be of use.

    Edit 2: Found another one I've used in the past. http://www.petesqbsite.com/sections/tut ... s/tsugumo/

  • This'll be a little offtopic but I think it'll be fruitful for some devs here.

    with cheap digital (photographic) cameras that get decent 30fps video at 640x480, I've been thinking of filming my own references.

    Jordan Mechner did, back in the day, and look where that got him!

    We've been doing that on our current project that has a top-down viewpoint. It makes some interesting results. We found a nice spot for a direct view to a point a few meters below and basically just traced the selected keyframes from the recorded videos. I'm more a traditional sprite artist and not much of an animator so it provided a very good template for animations.

    The real problems come into the picture when you're supposed to get a decent amount of tweens. Tracing sprites is alright but drawing quality keys on top of the traces is more time demanding than most could tolerate. A nice idea would be to trace the animation keys and make the animations with bones but I don't like this at all since it doesn't provide the awesome organic natural look that the previous method does.

    I've been looking for a nice piece of software to try out creating tweens with by morphing a key frame to another but I haven't found anything worthy. Photoshop's liquify (aka the thing that makes your favorite fashion model's body look ten years younger) seems rather nice but I don't think the feature is included in any of the versions of Photoshop I have a license to.

    Okay to the actual OP question then. No decent references here, but you might want to try out the method I described in this post.

  • You may use this test cap of ours as a reference for bone animating. My animations are rather groovy, basically looks like dancing of some sort (fits the project style), but I'd think it might be good reference for the kind of gameplay demonstrated in the cap.

    Arrow keys - move

    Shift - jump

    CTRL (hold) - run

    http://planar-studios.com/files/example/boneanim1.zip

  • Right, very informative. That's all there is I need to know, basically the start times with our current project ARE getting irritating in our test builds. The texture handling is more than useful to know in future development.

    Construct is the most powerful tool for fast development I've ever worked with. I'm not much of a coder myself but I find the Construct's inner works very intuitive. Will look forward and support further development as much as I can.

  • Thanks for the replies Ashley. We've drifting a little off-topic here but it doesn't matter since the conversation is productive.

    Another question regarding the texture handling: if I use external textures as in load files to fill sprites are the external textures all converted to PNG before the app runs? Is it faster to use external textures instead of ones inside the cap? When I add a sprite to Construct it converts it to a PNG, but if it's loaded in the runtime will Construct convert it to a PNG as well?

  • I tried resizing the sprite borders to the power of two and it works wonderfully! Using 32x32 instead of 32x24 fixed the clipping. Thanks for the hint. Though being forced to use square shaped borders kills a lot of possibilities with the tiling. I'd still like to see the possibility of being able to tile non-power of two shaped sprites without the pixel clipping problem.

    I wonder if it makes any difference in the clipping problem if you load the textures externally instead of internally. The external resource management is far from ready in this project but we'll get there.

    Edit: Right, next time I'll just go read the wiki word to word instead of swimming through bug reports.

    [quote:nre42lnv]The tiled background plugin renders fastest with a square power-of-two sized texture, i.e. 16x16, 32x32, 64x64, 128x128 etc. Using a texture of this size also results in very smooth scrolling, since other sized textures may introduce "seam" artefacts along the edges of tiles.

  • Thanks for the quick reply.

    Still makes me wonder why the last pixels are clipped. I've been under the assumption that no matter what size the sprite/texture is it's dimensions are always stretched to the power of two in the GPU memory. What I meant is that if I'm tiling a 256x256 texture and I want to display properly without the clipped 1px lines on the sides I'd have to change the dimensions to 257x257 to correct the tiling and thus using 512x512 worth of memory. This is what I meant with the unacceptable solution.

    All in all the problem is fixable in the demonstrated way but it makes accurate level designing a lot of trouble since the things are not working the way they should be.

    Edit: Also yeah, I'm very precise with my work and want the outcome to be good and I of course generally do use texture sizes that fit to the power of two. Regarding sprites I see no sense in trying to limit the looks with the sizing since it IS supposed to work no matter what the sprite dimensions are since, as said earlier, the dimensions are fit into the power two in the GPU memory.

    Also, it's possible to do the things included in my examples with sprites and not use the tiled texturing at all but don't you think that that, if something, would be non-efficient? Instead of having a few big tiling vents I'd have to have tens upon tens of individual vent sprites. I'm sure you see this point of view.

  • The problem described in this report is still around: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.ph ... id=1003219

    Basically the tiling textures don't display properly. I'd like to know if there is a solution other than the ones used in my examples. Stretching the textures and in some cases doubling the memory with textures that are sized in the power of two usage this way doesn't count as a solution.

    Attached picture has a detailed explanation.

    http://planar-studios.com/files/example/tiledbug.png

    <img src="http://planar-studios.com/files/example/tiledbug.png">

    Example cap http://planar-studios.com/files/example/tiledbug.cap

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  • Hi.

    Just recently we decided to release the sprite graphics of a product we developed here at Planar Studios free for non-commercial use. The graphics are from a presentation-like exploration game that was developed for a school located in Finland.

    The library consists of roughly 500 sprites from animated and static characters to various furniture and objects. It's all organized in categories. Additional details concerning the organization are written in the bundled readme-file.

    As written in the topic these sprites are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported license. Roughly broken down it means that you can do whatever you want with them as long as you give a fair credit to the original author. For commercial use you'd need a specially granted permission to use this library altogether. All this is written in greater detail in the bundled text files. License details are also available here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/

    To the point then. Here's some random picks from all of the library's categories. This picture should give a good idea of the style and looks of the sprites.

    <img src="http://planar-studios.com/img/screenshots/random-picks.png">

    Some examples for the use of the library:

    -base for game graphics

    -graphics for tutorial/demonstration code

    -placeholder graphics for rapid development

    -game graphics study

    -presentation graphics

    Download the library here:

    http://planar-studios.com/?nav=2&view=niilulib

    Direct download: http://planar-studios.com/download.php?file=niilulib

    Make sure to drop a line or two in my email if you find the sprites useful, I'm interested in the stuff people produce.

    Edit: bbcode fixes