The Mana World Forums

Hi,

From this topic :
http://forums.themanaworld.org/viewtopi ... 234#p34234

I fell on this: If it can help....

Best Regards (great work so far!!)

Bertram wrote:Hi,

From this topic :
http://forums.themanaworld.org/viewtopi ... 234#p34234

I fell on this:

If it can help....

Best Regards (great work so far!!)

Thank you for the reference,. seems not to be TMW art and I'm not sure if Josuhara confirmed if is GPL or have restrictions, anyways is a good example and I can use it to create our own sea water animation.

Thank you Bertram

EDIT : I checked the file, has 45 frames in order to make it smooth, and my question is if TMW server will support such type of animations or there is any restriction ?

WIP : well not exactly horizontal tiles, but I made the sequence to make a 2 tiles high cliff.

AxlTrozz wrote:EDIT : I checked the file, has 45 frames in order to make it smooth, and my question is if TMW server will support such type of animations or there is any restriction ?

For smoothness of animation, I'd much rather go with the particle engine moving those layers around rather than hard animating it by hand.

Hi Axl,

AxlTrozz wrote:EDIT : I checked the file, has 45 frames in order to make it smooth, and my question is if TMW server will support such type of animations or there is any restriction ?

As far as I know, technically, the animation is only handled by the client. And they're no known restriction. The server is only sending the map id when the player is entering it.

For smoothness of animation, I'd much rather go with the particle engine moving those layers around rather than hard animating it by hand.

Indeed, I agree with Rotonen, it would be too much work to get it smooth when made by hand. I'm sure such moving layers can be made in this purpose.

EDIT: I really like the way you did the shore, btw.

Best regards

AxlTrozz wrote:EDIT : I checked the file, has 45 frames in order to make it smooth, and my question is if TMW server will support such type of animations or there is any restriction ?

45 frame animations are possible. This is a client thing unrelated to the server, btw.

Rotonen wrote:For smoothness of animation, I'd much rather go with the particle engine moving those layers around rather than hard animating it by hand.

That won't work. Things like that are what animated tiles are good for.

Maybe you should finally familarize yourself with the particle engine so that you have a better judgement what it can and can't do.

AFAIK the particle engine can move objects in relation to each other and these can have alpha properties. I see a shoreline wavefront as better doable with it since the overlay system cannot be tied to a location. With animated tiles I see a risk of animation desync between tiles.

Anyway, this is getting off topic, so when the time comes to think of the finer details of a technical implementation of a shoreline, we'll get back to this and all sides will be better prepared for the whole affair.

For now, nice going with the cliff. Where are you going to take the palette usage with the accompanying grass tiles?

Rotonen wrote:AFAIK the particle engine can move objects in relation to each other and these can have alpha properties. I see a shoreline wavefront as better doable with it since the overlay system cannot be tied to a location.

Wrong. You would need a huge number of particles spawned by a huge number of differently configured emitters. This means a shitload of work for the mapper and you would hit the particle cap in no time.

Rotonen wrote:With animated tiles I see a risk of animation desync between tiles.

Wrong, animated tiles are always synchronized. There is no risk that any desynchronisation happens. It does in fact take considerable effort to desynchronize animated tiles on purpose.


I designed and programmed both features and you can trust me when I tell you: This is a job for animated tiles, not for the particle engine.

Humm,

Let's say then that a quite equivalent effect should be doable with less than 40 frames.

Regards.

The artist will take as many frames as the artist needs. What would be the point of a restriction here anyway?

In brief :

1. Animated tiles is the best option for the water (I remember Elven saying the same somewhere)
2. There is no known restriction on the number of animated tiles (maybe 48 tiles are a little too much, but you only have to do half of them 24, then you repeat the sequence backwards)

I'll try to work on animated water tiles (small section) and may be we can test it on the client.

AxlTrozz wrote:I'll try to work on animated water tiles (small section) and may be we can test it on the client.

DON'T

There are still things with higher priority. If we try to not split our efforts for too many fronts we could really finish some base tilesets for cliffs, village, walls, academy exterior. I know that may be boring doing the same things for longer time, but we have only 1,5 month to end this ear. And many of us wishes to see real progress in CR1 on Christmas ;)

Animated water isn't really top priority thing for CR1, we can always place it in CR2. So far you are great as Chief of this sub-project, but don't think you are almighty and you have time for putting every single pixel in GFX section. Often wise management is better than doing everything on your own. We need you in pixelart, that's a fact, but we also need tutor newbies for the sake of future.

AxlTrozz wrote:There is no known restriction on the number of animated tiles (maybe 48 tiles are a little too much, but you only have to do half of them 24, then you repeat the sequence backwards)

There is in fact a restriction:
All frames of an animated tile must be on the same tileset and a tilesets is limited to 16x16 tiles. This means 256 frames is the maximum.

Crush wrote:a tileset is limited to 16x16 tiles

Where is that limitation?

In the graphic guidelines.

This might be mostly an organisational limitation, but there also seems to be a technical limitation which isn't much higher.

I've already seen TMW servers which tried to use much larger tilesets and they encountered various graphic bugs.