Animated art

[hexer]

I have a few questions about animated art:

1) Does FOnline support GIF animations?

2) Is there a certain background color for animations that can be used as transparent color or I really need to have each frame transparent?

[John Porno]

I'm not entirely sure about gifs. I've seen them being used as inventory icons, but I dont know if it properly animated.

Apart from using the good old .frm, you can use .fofrm now, which is basically a .frm, split into a .fofrm textfile that takes care of the fps, offset and filepaths to a bunch of .png's. It allows you to use alpha channel and stuff while mimicking a .frm. You'll see examples in the 2238 sdk.

[JovankaB]

Beside standard alpha channel in pngs, RGB(0,0,255) or in other words pure blue color
is rendered as transparency. There is one advantage of using it over alpha channel
- resized images look slightly better (or at least they did with the last version of FOnline
engine which I was using). The difference is large enough IMHO to stick with blue, at
least in the case of items' inventory pictures, which are usually resized to fit in the slots.

Another case where the difference is visible, is when player zooms in/out the map view,
so I would always use blue for transparency unless alpha channel was really required
to achieve some effect (like smoke, glass, soft shadows, etc) or it didn't matter at all
(like in the case of interface backgrounds).

[hexer]

I've read in one of the update logs those last FOnline revisions that support for the blue is out. I can't confirm this since I can't run Fonline revisions 413+ because my hardware doesn't support vertex shaders.

I will try to create smoke effects - can they obscure vision?

[John Porno]

if you talk about something like smoke grenades where the smoke blocks the sightlines for targetting, then yes, that's possible.

[hexer]

I was thinking more along the lines of Fog of War. I know it's possible since Mash did it in Fallout 2 engine.

[John Porno]

yeah I know one guy doing something like that. I havent seen it ingame myself but I've heard it was quite sharp. I don't know to what extent a fog effect could be added to it.

[Lexx]

Doesn't TLA use smoke or gas grenades or something like that?

[hexer]

Does anyone know what is the largest art size that can fit into the engine?
I tried adding a 2500 x 2000 px art and it died

[hexer]

It has something to do with width. When I cut it in 2 pieces vertically it worked.

[Lexx]

No idea about the maximum size, but I'll suggest to cut every graphic into maximum 512x512px parts, because of graphic memory usage and such. Especially for the world map this is important.

[Dagnir]

Beside standard alpha channel in pngs, RGB(0,0,255) or in other words pure blue color
is rendered as transparency.

Not anymore, starting from revision 413. Not sure why, blue indeed was better than alpha.

[hexer]

I see they replaced image handler with something new. Too bad there's no more blue

[hexer]

Speaking of animated art is there support for talking heads or at least static images inside the dialog?

[Lexx]

Not that I know. You can add an image to the dialog, but nothing that animates with lipsync and sound.