fodev.net
FOnline Development => Questions and Answers => Topic started by: hexer on January 20, 2014, 10:36:33 pm
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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?
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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.
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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).
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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?
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if you talk about something like smoke grenades where the smoke blocks the sightlines for targetting, then yes, that's possible.
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I was thinking more along the lines of Fog of War. I know it's possible since Mash did it in Fallout 2 engine.
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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.
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Doesn't TLA use smoke or gas grenades or something like that?
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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 :(
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It has something to do with width. When I cut it in 2 pieces vertically it worked.
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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.
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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.
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I see they replaced image handler with something new. Too bad there's no more blue
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Speaking of animated art is there support for talking heads or at least static images inside the dialog?
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Not that I know. You can add an image to the dialog, but nothing that animates with lipsync and sound.
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Talking heads will be missed. I presume you could put an animated FRM inside the dialog at least?
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No idea, never tested this. It probably works, but I would use the FOnline fofrm format for animations. You don't have to use any frm files at all (which is good, because working with frm files is a pain).
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Desert Europe has avatars in dialogs
(https://i.imgur.com/Cpfwekf.jpg)
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fonliner, thanks for the idea. We have many portraits so maybe we will use this together with talking heads :)
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No problem but tell me what exactly your avatars will work and look? Are you going to implement talking heads with animations and sound? And do you want to use static avatars something like these from desert europe? :D Please make more updates, upload arts or screenshots.
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I will make more updates but now I'm too busy making new art - I presume in the end there will be around 3,000 new art files in this game. Once I put it in the game, I will release lots of screenshots. Don't worry.
We're not sure how our talking heads & portraits will work but talking heads will be voiced!
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Not anymore, starting from revision 413. Not sure why, blue indeed was better than alpha.
I guess this applies to BMP as well, as long as they are 24-bit.
@hexer:
Indexed (8-bit) formats should work with RGB (0,0,255), this includes GIFs as well. However, I would advise against the GIF format. The best option is to go with FRM (if you want to achieve a low-fi Fallout 1/2 style) or with PNGs (if you want a rich coloured, detailed gfx a la FOT: BoS). Find yourself someone who can into Fallout 1/2 gfx or ask around here for tips.