I've seen people manually edit alpha channels in their games. WHy not use pngs instead? I use png in all my games. It looks better, but would ofc not be suitable for pixel games.
But why make picel games, anyway?
This forum is full of trolls and disinfo agents.
DaVince This fool just HAD to have a custom rating
Registered 04/09/2004
Points 7998
4th January, 2012 at 00:00:47 -
I think you're not understanding something here... PNG is just an image file format. Why would you save all resources in external PNG files when MMF has built-in, specialized objects that handle what you want to do much better (ie. active objects and backdrops)?
Make your graphics in whatever, export it to PNG, and then import it into MMF2. It'll be exactly the same. (If it's not, that's a bug.)
Really, PNG is just a way of storing your image data. It's not going to look better or worse when you use it.
I use PNG files and I manually edit alpha channels. I think most people don't modify alpha channels because they either don't understand how they work, or they are just too lazy.
Originally Posted by Hayo Or they don't want gfx that look photoshopped.
I think you mean don't want graphics with anti aliasing or alpha channels - has nothing to do with photoshop. Of course if you anti alias everything, it would look terrible. Obviously for things like game sprites and the like, stay away from using any AAing.
Fordom is probably talking about importing PNGs with alpha-transparency into MMF2's graphic editor (which does preserve alpha-transparency). I don't think he understands that once a PNG is imported into the editor it stops being a PNG, and I think most of the naysayers are assuming Fordom is talking about using external PNG files with something like the Active Picture Object because most of us don't use the import feature under MMF's graphic editor. We're more familiar with either creating pixel art from scratch or copy/pasting graphic data into the editor (which doesn't preserve alpha-transparency).
I think a lot of the opinion about using alpha-transparency within MMF is unfounded. Our community is choked-full of pixel artists, and 2D pixel artists don't usually mess with alpha-transparency. As long as you aren't using alpha-transparencies on actives that don't move or interact and your games look good, you may as well just stick with it.
By the way Fordom, there's a difference between correcting the incorrect and insulting them. Next time somebody says something that you know isn't true, you should probably refrain from insulting their intelligence and stick to educating them. Considering DaVince was only trying to be helpful and provide you an answer, your reply was rude.
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Originally Posted by Hayo Or they don't want gfx that look photoshopped.
I like gfx that look photoshopped. Not badly photoshopped, but most of the modern indie games have a pleasant look.
Disclaimer: Any sarcasm in my posts will not be mentioned as that would ruin the purpose. It is assumed that the reader is intelligent enough to tell the difference between what is sarcasm and what is not.
My new *in development* java game uses png's but not the alpha channels, it's just for loading graphic assets, it also uses wave files for sound.
But in TGF/MMF I don't use it, most of my graphics are made in the built-in editor and just need to be transparent or not and not the different levels of opacity.
However, if you could edit (I have actually no idea if this is or isn't possible) the levels of opacity real time that would surely give some nice effects.
But I think because TGF/MMF is built around the active objects system which are graphics but not imported pngs, is the reason pngs aren't used a lot in-game.
I've managed to apply alpha filters to graphics in real-time in Java. I just apply an RGBImageFilter, maintain a memoization cache of filtered images for later use, and then load them through a MediaTracker to force the application to wait until it is done processing the new images from the RGBImageFilter.
Jup have has this and you can do cool stuff with it, just like you can edit a palette realtime which allow for other cool effects like plasma. But I am unsure if MMF has this feature. It does have those ink effects which can be setup, but I don't think the level of control is available as in Java. But also Java has it's limitations like the garbage collector or the underlying JVM implementation on the Operating System.
The garbage collection system hardly slows it down at all.
The JVM isn't a problem either since in most cases the byte code is just as fast as native c++ code unless you're using assembly to speed things up.
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Edited by Fish20
jenswa.neocities.org
