Translucency

What's the secret?

Right, down to business. For my oppening section of a game I am making, it gets dark as the player tries to get out of a forest, and when it gets dark, monsters apear. The best way I can think of for making an area get darker is by using translucent stamps placed above everything else in an animation where the pictures slowly get more opaque. The way I tried (and failed) to do this was by using photoshop to make a translucent layer above a white background. As a test, I put one of the translucent pictures on the map and ran the game. Both in the map editor and in the game, the stamp was a solid block of color. What is the secret for making Coldstone translucents? My pictures are PNG. The manual says something about using an alpha chanel to make a transfer mask, but neigther me or my dad, an almost expert at photoshop, can figure out how to make that work. Would one of you graphics geniuses come down from the clouds and help me out here?

Thanks in advance!

I only managed to get this to work once and it involved making an alpha channel and using that. I can't help after that because I never managed to get it to work again. Your best bet is to wait for the update which should hopefully have proper PNG support

Doesn't work in the EDITOR, but it looks fine in-game. However, you can't place it on a white background, it has to be transparent. So, transparent background, then make new layer fill with black and give it opacity, say, 50%?

Anyway, I did this once, too, to make a night cutscene. It makes the game go really slow, so I would suggest that you make your stamps animations that become darker over time. Don't use ground tiles, use stamps instead.

I'm in Photoshop 7

1. Make a new canvas
----- Canvas is transparent

2. Click on rectangle and make a rectangle, or any other image outline you want
------ no stroke
------ fill is black (000000)
------ opacity is 50% (or whatever you want)
------ do not check anti-aliases, uncheck it

3. In your small layers-channels-paths window, click on channels

4. At the bottom, create new channel
------ this is automatically named alpha1

5. Double click on alpha1
----- color = black or 000000
----- opacity = 50%
----- no anti-aliased, make sure it is not checked

6. Make sure that alpha1 is highlighted, then SAVE AS

7. When the Save As window comes up ...
------ alpha channel is checked, check it
------ do not check the layers, no layers
------ a copy will be checked and that's okay
------ it will save as a copy and that's okay
------ then save as
------ it will be a photoshop file

8. Now Save for Web
------ png-24
------ Check transparency, transparency is checked
------ Save your image.png and place it in your Coldstone pictures folder

Yep, it slows down the game. Bummer. But it looks nice.

Probably a bit off-topic, but I must ask. What exactly is the alpha channel for? I've gotten those PNG's to work flawlessly without any alpha channel. Transparency too.

Ledorax, on Mar 26 2005, 11:10 PM, said:

Probably a bit off-topic, but I must ask. What exactly is the alpha channel for? I've gotten those PNG's to work flawlessly without any alpha channel. Transparency too.View Post

you probably have a later version of photoshop, near as i can tell 7 and 8 ( cs ) translate transparency fromthe way the images/layers look...wysiwyg...they built it in maybe theey noticed an influx of requests and talk about alphas on the web and did something about the problem ( we're far from the only gaming platform/niche group using PNG for its qualities )Alphas aren't necessary to get a png to be recognized/wwork.An alpha channel is for transparency aka blending.

How very fortunate for me.

Here's an example of our new found convenience....i just grabbed the brush and played around for 20 seconds with it set to multiply. in case that doesn't work for you:http://fapomatic.com...?loc=8&f=mo.png

This post has been edited by ellrx : 27 March 2005 - 10:15 AM

I have day and night in Anira, and I make it so that it doesn't lag a lot by having my transparent PNG as a player portrait that goes over the whole main interface. It still lags a tiny bit, but not too much

This post has been edited by Yoggy : 27 March 2005 - 11:16 AM

Very nice, Yoggy! I tried that and it works very well! Thanks!

Wow, Yoggy. That's a really good idea! That is most likely what I'm going to do, once I get this working.