Idea related to Animated sceneries

[smiluu]

For not having glasses, achne, scruffy goatee and knowledge of coding, I'm not entirely sure how the sprites worked in the older games (Liero for instance), so feel free to fill me and others in incase you know what I'm talking about. Idea was that each frame was put in a line and the engine runs through them which displays an animation. This could work better than .gifs and would allow half transparency in animations.

Here's an example of what the scenery files would look like:



If I'm right, the current explosion animation uses similiar technique.

[chutem]

In what way would this work better than a gif?

[smiluu]

I dont know, but I do know that gifs works like s**t and I was suggesting and asking if this would work better.

[KYnetiK]

This would increase visual quality at the expense of performance.

You would have to use pngs for any transparency, but bitmaps are faster to read and process. You would then use some kind of additive blending to achieve transparency effects.

However, the game itself still needs to read each sector of an image, slice/offset it, label and store it, then use it accordingly - and do this quickly. A gif would do most of this work on its own.


It would be an interesting way to make sure that each client displays the same frame of animation mind you.

[xmRipper]

What about APNG

[L[0ne]R]

This would increase visual quality at the expense of performance.

You would have to use pngs for any transparency, but bitmaps are faster to read and process. You would then use some kind of additive blending to achieve transparency effects.

However, the game itself still needs to read each sector of an image, slice/offset it, label and store it, then use it accordingly - and do this quickly. A gif would do most of this work on its own.


It would be an interesting way to make sure that each client displays the same frame of animation mind you.

You could also use TGAs with transparency channel, but I'm not sure how well those would work either.. Many games use DDS format, but I don't know much about the animation part of it. :/ APNGs are a relatively new format and I haven't seen it used in games.. yet, at least.

But yeah, AFAIK the way that smiluu suggested is also a very common way of making animated sprites in games, athough it only allows 1 level of transparency. Yes, Soldat already uses a similar way for rendering explosion effects, except it uses a separate image for each frame, which probably has a heavier impact performance than if it used just one image like in the main post. Maybe along with the main sprite there could be some separate sprite which would serve as transparency mask..

[smiluu]

What about APNG

But will it work any better than gif, apart from the lesser graphics restrictions? As far as I've seen the way explosion animation works has always been working flawlessly with both default or modded non- and half transparent animations. Other formats than gif should be worth of try, animations that actually work and serves to their full effect could turn soldat to something else.