Life among the stars - unfinished 2nd PGD challenge entry

[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.

[SilverWarior]

Yesterday I hadn't done any progress. The reason for that is the fact that I had 12 hour day shift yesterday and came home dead tired, so I went straight to bed.
Unfortunatly today I won't have much time either becouse I have 12 hour night shift and would need atleast few hours of afternoon nap. So I'm afraid that I won't be able to finish the playable version before dedline. Sorry Will.
Anywhay as I sad before I do intend to finish this game (I had idea for it now for quite some time).

As for the graphics until now I had been always using JPEGS with alpha chanel support. And till now I had no problem becouse I was always working with Paint Shop Pro 7 but recently I upgraded to Corel Paint Shop X3 and I must say that I'm verry disapointed over it. So I already removed it from my system and instaled older one.

Someday in the future when I manage to finish my other project (Objective Texture Generator) that I'm ocasionaly working on I probably won't have any more problems in designing graphics on my own. Currently there is still no thread for this project becouse I still haven't completly decided whether I sould use VCL or use some advanced Graphic engine for it. I'm leaning to second option becouse this would probably alow me to port it to muliple platforms much easier and provide smother operations. But it will require more work on it. I would need to make my own VCL like components for it. Actually this is what I'm trying to do in my game and if I sucseed it will move both of my projects considerably.