The Mana World Forums

Rotonen wrote:I thought it was a tombstone..

That's because you need to play more classic Pac-Man.

Question about transparency:
Should it be an alpha channel in the png or just make the transoarent areas pink (or wathever other color) and the transparency will be adde by the engine?

Do alpha channel.
The pink gives us an incorrect idea of what the colors are, and as far as I'm aware, doesn't support varying levels of transparency.

Kyokai wrote:

Rotonen wrote:I thought it was a tombstone..

That's because you need to play more classic Pac-Man.

I remembered that the ghosts in Pac-Man weren't flatbottomed..

Rotonen: ok ok...

Talaroc: I'm sorry I suggested pink, I don't really know how PNG transparency works, so I had no idea.

It's all good. Not going to begrudge you something you didn't know. Hell, I only found out how it works recently.

Just for the record. When done properly, png transparency is really quite nice. It's what allowed me to get the smooth outlining in the character sprites; the "solid" outline is actually only 95% opaque, and there are individual pixels of various opacities (50%, 33%, 25%...) placed around rough edges to smooth them out. Not only does it create the illusion of a higher resolution than we're actually using, the partial transparency allows the character to "blend" a little more in various environments, leading to a more realistic look. That effect, actually, is one of the things I want to talk to people about in the artists' meeting on Saturday. It also has some very fun potential applications; if you want, say, a shallow pool of water, you can just make the floor sprites for underneath, then overlay semitransparent water tiles on top, making it more realistic as well as reducing the time needed to get the proper look. Some items, too, such as potions, can be semitransparent, to achieve a far greater "liquid" look (in most games it winds up kind of looking like they're drinking paint... ). Things like that aren't possible with the pink trick, but the real possibilities now available to people haven't really gotten widely enough known as yet.

Talaroc just i was thinking. Agree on everything you have said. Actually i was drawing a sword and thought how cool would look if i added a shine with transparency in the end.

Go for it. Just keep in mind that shine-type effects are probably only usable for item icons (in the inventory, that sort of thing), since the player might be walking through low-light areas in-game, wherein a shine on the sword would look somewhat odd.

lol yesterday i made an icon too dont expec too much i am not good in pixel art

We really have to be careful with those transparencies though, if we start using alpha layer for everything (GUI, top tile layer, water layer, beings, objects, ...) then the game WILL slow down and some of us are already at only 30-50 fps as it is now. We should consider to make things optional (like GUI and top tile layer transparency) and maybe solve the water thing differently (like blending the item/player blue instead of drawing the entire water sheet, not sure how hard this is, but actually we can do without water interaction for now I think).

Just curious...what's the ideal frame rate you're going for? I mean, 30-50fps...that's significantly faster than is used in movies or TV (they use 24, as I recall).

I'm not suggesting we use transparencies on everything, of course. But the game will look a lot better if the things that would be transparent in RL are transparent in-game.

Bjørn wrote:We really have to be careful with those transparencies though, if we start using alpha layer for everything (GUI, top tile layer, water layer, beings, objects, ...) then the game WILL slow down and some of us are already at only 30-50 fps as it is now. We should consider to make things optional (like GUI and top tile layer transparency) and maybe solve the water thing differently (like blending the item/player blue instead of drawing the entire water sheet, not sure how hard this is, but actually we can do without water interaction for now I think).

Really don't know how would perform... Any precedent?

About the water, another solution is to make pseudo-transparency, something like this (imagine that the character is interacting with the water):
-Bottom layer: Just a tile simulating water.
-Med layer: The character
-Top layer: The bottom layer but with some "holes" in it, so we can see part of the medium layer (character) thru.

This decision pretty much depends on the engine.

Eh, I don't know...pseudo-transparency works, but it looks kind of...bad.

Talaroc wrote:Eh, I don't know...pseudo-transparency works, but it looks kind of...bad.

I know, it was only in case that transparency eat too much resources.
Anyway the condition character-on-the-water is going to be an unusual scenario...

Talaroc wrote:Just curious...what's the ideal frame rate you're going for? I mean, 30-50fps...that's significantly faster than is used in movies or TV (they use 24, as I recall).

I'm not suggesting we use transparencies on everything, of course. But the game will look a lot better if the things that would be transparent in RL are transparent in-game.

Yeah we should just use transparencies for what is reasonable. Most tiles will be completely opaque, and the ones that need to shine through can probably be masked. I think we should exploit this. For objects, the drawing method can vary from object to object. For example the player character would certainly be alpha blended, just because it does look quite a bit better.

About the 24 fps, that's ridiculous. I know they use that framerate in movies, and it's very noticable, I'd love if they'd upgrade that to like 60 fps, because it DOES make a big difference. Especially when playing a scrolling game, I'd want the scrolling to be smooth, pixel by pixel if possible. Even more important is the speed of the mouse cursor and windows I drag around. Basically, my point is I am only really happy when the fps meets the screen refresh rate.