Life among the stars - unfinished 2nd PGD challenge entry

[SilverWarior]

This project looks very interesting, but I think it's a bit too ambitious for a 4 week mini competition. Maybe next challenge aim a little smaller and more focused towards the actual theme it's self?

As I sad before I didn't intend to include all of the mentioned fetures and not in alll of the extend that I have writen in my post. So if I hadn't spent so much time on planet generation algorithm I would probably have a playable game right now.

Also if you have something that is playable, it would be nice that you at least upload something. I only have whats on the FTP server to showcase so when the 2n PGD Challenge page comes up and there was only X number of submitted games out of Y actual attempts, it makes the event look like only X actually cared, when there was actually Y many people who did.

I'm sorry but unfortunatly I don't have anything playable. Even GUI is just several unlinked forms wich alowed me to test certain parts of my game. Mostly they are just textual representation of certain ingame values.
I started working on the game's core before I was even thinking of doing any GUI. The main reason for this is that it took me quite some time to decide wich graphic engine I intend to use. Unfortunatly I would need atleast couple of days to make some proper GUI and make everything playable.

But if you are wiling to wait a few days I might turn what I have into playable form, even thou the gameplay would probably suck.

[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.