Life among the stars - unfinished 2nd PGD challenge entry

[WILL]

Hmm... well I do have celebrity Apprentice to watch tonight... (I watch it with my wife, that's my excuse. ) then I might miraculously get disoriented and forget where I left my entire community web site... hmm... naw I wouldn't even be able to go that far without someone calling me on it. lol

What would you all say to an extra couple of days extension?

If I were one of my grade school teachers, I'd just take off something like -5 points per day late, but since I have no way of tracking that, I say extension.

Extension everybody? 2 days?

[SilverWarior]

Thanks for that I'll try to use it as much as I can.

[SilverWarior]

Unfortunatly I'm not making any progress.
I just spent several hour today making graphics for games GUI. And then I spent several hour more figuring out why my GUOI isn't rendered as it should be (no transparency). And what I finally figured out? All my gpraphics are f****** up. The reason for this is the fact that Corel Pint Shop Pro X3 doesn't save any transparency information in my graphics files but instead replaces them with white color (in both JPG and TGA formats). Here went whole day for nothing.

So now I'll have to fix all my graphics with old Jasc Paint Shop Pro 7. This wil take me atleast hour of work. And to be honest after spending all theese hours for nothing I lost all interest in doing this.
Hopefuly I'll have more motivation tomorw.

[User137]

You should use PNG format for transparency. JPG is format that only has RGB channels, TGA maybe has alpha too, but its more flexible format.

[SilverWarior]

Thanks for the info I completly forgot that Apshyre has support for PNG graphics. But still it will take me quite some time fixing them. Also any auto,ated fixings is oiut of question becouse parts of my graphics do have white color si it will completly ruin them.

[Ingemar]

You should use PNG format for transparency. JPG is format that only has RGB channels, TGA maybe has alpha too, but its more flexible format.

Yes, TGA has alpha too. TGA is best for educational purposes, when it is an advantage to avoid dependencies and still keep the amount of code low; it is simple and requites little code to handle. However, PNG is better for your final products, since it has better compression.

[WILL]

I thought that PNG was the "unofficial standard" for sprite graphics these days? There are other formats out there for different platforms, but for your everyday Win/Mac machines, minus encoding for protection I already figured that PNG was the go-to format.

[Jimmy Valavanis]

Indeed PNG format is a good choice, it provides better lossless compression compared with RLE, and also you can define alpha channel.
Two techniques that I follow when I'm dealing with sprites is to use eg RGB(0,0,0) to identify "void space" and make black equal to eg RGB(1,1,1) or use 2 separate images files, one for content and another for alpha channel and compine them at runtime or even use them to "prebuild" a custom img format. (actually I've done this once and I'm reusing the same code). Both techniques are not perfect (especially the 2nd is slow in runtime compine), but eliminate the need of an image processing tool that is alpha-channel aware, at least for my needs.

[Ingemar]

I thought that PNG was the "unofficial standard" for sprite graphics these days? There are other formats out there for different platforms, but for your everyday Win/Mac machines, minus encoding for protection I already figured that PNG was the go-to format.

Yes, it is. In the past, I was a bit uncomfortable with it since I had to link with libpng, which is not necessarily pre-installed so I had to fix a static linked library. However, the pnglite library makes this much easier, a smaller library that is much easier to build, and all I need is libz.

But I still like TGA for laborations, where you can have a complete loader in about two pages of code.