A Question for all you Spritesperts...

Hello, and thankyou fro taking the time to read this. I wish to make a set of sprites and i have a problem. The ship that the sprites belong too is 200200 pixels in size, it can be no other way. This becomes a problem when the ship turns it looks awfull (with a standard 36 frame setup). So being an adventurous person I rendered a new set of sprites that has 49 frames. (EVO Bible says that it has to be less than 50). This gives me a 77 grid, again everything is peachy until I play, the Spin resource recognizes the frames, but still only uses the first 36. HELP :eek: :eek: :eek: :eek:

So I want to use more than 36 frames, but can't work out how to do it. If anyone out there has a clue please help me, especially if you have done this before!
🙂

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Kberg

We are the Borg.

Lower your shields
and surrender your builds.

We will add your networkable
and technologicaly distinctive game to our own collection.

Your builds will adapt to service us.

RESISTANCE IS FUTILE.

(This message has been edited by Vindicator609 (edited 08-14-2000).)

I'm not an expert on sprites (in fact I made my plug work through guess and test), but here's an idea. Did you look in the spin resource and change the "x sprites" and "y sprites" from 6 to 7?

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EV Haiku- by Matt Burch

Floating chunks of rock
Space bomb drops too soon- kaboom
time for escape pod

the game engine only recognizes headings as multiples of ten degrees, hence the 36 picts (at least, this is my guess. since the weapons fire strait off the nose it's either this or the engine somehow adapts to more complete sprites, which would be really impractical). maybe i'm wrong and setting the spin to recognize a 7x7 sprite works. as a quick test, give the ship a really slow turn rate and a weapon that fires strait off the nose (0 inaccuracy). it should point one way, then shift to the next pic. if the weapon always fires strait off the nose, the game engine most likely only recognizes 36 headings. if the weapon sweeps the engine recognizes more headings and just uses the most correct sprite pic, which means you can do any sprite size within reason

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if tin whistles are made of tin, what's a fog horn made of?

I my experience with EV, it only uses the first 36 frames, whatever you set the spin to. Leaving the spin at 6x6 would make it use nonlinear frames, while setting it to 7x7 would use the first 36 consecutive frames and leave out the rest. Setting it to less, like say 5x6, makes EV fill in black frames extra. I don't know how they did the asteroids, probably programmed it differently.

EV knows how to use more headings - weapons (particularly noticeably beams) turn smoothly. I'd expect EV to just use more frequent frames, but it does not. I don't know about EVO 1.0.2, since a lot of it's graphical size limits were eliminated this one may have been as well.

If not, hope for EV3...

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Sorry everyone, but I forgot to mention that i allready set the spďn to 7x7 previously to my first post. Um...I think that you could be correct in assuming that the game engine only supports the first 36 frames, regardless of the what the spďn is set to. I guess I will just have to put up with jerky graphics :frown:

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Kberg

We are the Borg.

Lower your shields
and surrender your builds.

We will add your networkable
and technologicaly distinctive game to our own collection.

Your builds will adapt to service us.

RESISTANCE IS FUTILE.

Why don't you ask David from Meowx directly. He's done a lot of various size ships in his plug-ins.

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The final word(s) on EVO spďns:
1. It must be 36 frames - sorry, no smoother turns.
2. The horizontal width must be divisible by 8.
3. Any size for a single sprite over 200 pixels is iffy.
Hope this clears stuff up!
-david-

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Graphics. Games. And more...
(url="http://"http://www.meowx.com")Meowx Design Studios(/url)

Quote

Originally posted by Meowx Design:
**The final word(s) on EVO spďns:
1. It must be 36 frames - sorry, no smoother turns.
2. The horizontal width must be divisible by 8.
3. Any size for a single sprite over 200 pixels is iffy.
Hope this clears stuff up!
-david-

**

Are you sure it's that high? I rendered a 172x172 sprite and Pics2Sprites quit with an error type 2. Anyone know how to make them this large without making Pics2sprites(and my desktop for that matter) get messed up? I've given it a ton of memory, so I doubt that's the problem...

_bomb

i've had minimal success making the sprites manually, but for some reason they load really slowly if you do. so if all else fails (and i mean all else, let your dog walk on the keyboard for a while before you try this), open up some graphics-capable program (even clarisworks if you're desperate) and copy and paste into a big block, then copy that and paste it into resedit. it's really slow and it makes the sprite really slow to load, but it works

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if tin whistles are made of tin, what's a fog horn made of?

_bomb, just a quick mention...172 isn't divisible by 8. I don't know if that's your problem or not. IIRC, I've successfully used PICS2Sprites to make a 168x168 ship.

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Quote

Originally posted by Weepul 884:
**_bomb, just a quick mention...172 isn't divisible by 8. I don't know if that's your problem or not. IIRC, I've successfully used PICS2Sprites to make a 168x168 ship.

**

Then it's no wonder I failed math. (Pre-Calculus, actually...) Anyway, I meant 176x176, and it didn't work. I think it's because I rendered it Infini-D at a smaller size (172x172) and it came out with some static.. I've had the problem before, though.

_bomb

Quote

Originally posted by _bomb:
**Are you sure it's that high? I rendered a 172x172 sprite and Pics2Sprites quit with an error type 2. Anyone know how to make them this large without making Pics2sprites(and my desktop for that matter) get messed up? I've given it a ton of memory, so I doubt that's the problem...

_bomb**

200x200 is possible...maybe even bigger. I think some of the quantumire ships are bigger than 200x200.

As far as I can tell with Pics2Sprites...it doesn't work on anything bigger than 168x168. Sucks doesn't it? I wanna render some os my ships at 2x their size...but I can't tile them afterward with Pics2Sprites...Makespin is limited cause it can't crop sprites like Pics2Sprites can...geez, I'm stuck...

PEACE YO!

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~Kwanza~

"Quoted the Kwanza Man...nevermore"

AIM: Kwanzar26

Kwanzasoft Graphics
(url="http://"http://www.crosswinds.net/~kwanza")www.crosswinds.net/~kwanza(/url)

(This message has been edited by Kwanzar (edited 08-16-2000).)

Quote

Originally posted by Kwanzar:
**200x200 is possible...maybe even bigger. I think some of the quantumire ships are bigger than 200x200.
**

ERRRR, nope, the biggest ships are 200 pixels horizontally.

And as for Pics2Sprites, here's the official Meowx Design Studios way of making sprites:
1. Render a 36 frame movie of the ship spinning.
2. Open the rendered movie in QT Player.
3. Open a new document in ColorIt! (not Photoshop, CI works better for this) with the size of 6XHorizontal and 6XVertical.
4. Paste the sprites in, 1 by 1.

And yes, that's really how I've done every sprite from Quantumire to MAGMA to Project Nebula!

-david-

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Graphics. Games. And more...
(url="http://"http://www.meowx.com")Meowx Design Studios(/url)