Giant Sprites

[Dinonykos]

I have just realized: The reason why I thought that Sprites are only allowed to be 176 px wide is that if you use pngs, the sprite won't be displayed correctly if you e.g. use an image with a width of 300 px. I assume that 176 has to be multiplied with certain factors. At least, a 528 px (176*3) wide image works perfectly.

In this context, I would like to ask the programmers if it would be very complicated to allow the designer to decide whether the sprite is displayed over the texts, or vice versa (maybe in form of a checkbox). At the moment, the text is displayed on top of everything else in the main screen (which is generally reasonable), but sometimes it would be cool to have a huge sprite appear on top of the text.

This is not yet a request , I would only ask for it if it could be done without a lot of effort.

[manikus]

Hi Dinonykos.

What if I told you that you can already do this?

I've attached a proof of concept image and an editor aid image.

Step 1) set the size of each frame - must be a factor of the total width of the image
Step 2) press the "Update Frame Data" button

I used an image that was 300x300 with one frame and entered such, but when I re-opened the editor to get my screenshot, it had reset to "3" frames, but it still worked.

Obviously, I'm using the newest release, but I recall doing this on accident in a version earlier than the one you are using. so give it a try.

[Dinonykos]

Well, I tested with 300 px wide sprites, and at least in the version I use, in case I used a png file, the sprites were displayed skipped and with strange colours. (I did not forget to change the frame width... ) There was no problem when I used bmp files. However, since 352 and 528 px wide sprites work perfectly (also in png format), this does not bother me.

My question was another one (I should not always deal with to different problems in one message... ):
In your nice example, you see that the text "sprite test" is displayed on top of the sprite. What I would like to have is the option to display the sprite on top of the text, so that a sprite could e.g. cover the names of the party members or the text displayed in the event text section of the screen.

[manikus]

Well, I did use a 300x300 PNG image, so at least it will work in the new version. I think the magic number for PNG files in the older version is that it be a multiple of 8 or 16, I can't remember which. It is for this reason that some of the art files are the size they are, maybe even for all of them.

So, what you're really asking about is the lyer order, i.e. what appears on top. I'm going to put on a request for this as soon as I post. If this is something that could be set in the config.txt file, that would be ideal. While I'm not interested in sprites being on top, per se, I am interested in whether horizontal borders are on top of vertical or viewport frames. It would be nice if all elements could be set, though I do realize that this opens up a potential pandora's box of issues as what happens when someone tries to put the viewport below the frame or background (not the backdrop in the viewport but the whole-screen background).

[Dinonykos]

Well, you may be right concerning the multiples of 16. I even had a small Deja Vu just a second ago. Either, we discussed this earlier, or maybe it is related to a discussion about combat icons...

Chosing the order of layers in the config.sys would be great (I'd say the whole file is a Pandora's box already... ). To me, it would be even greater if you could change the layer of images in the editor, so that sprites could sometimes appear on top of the text and sometimes behind. But, again, I would make this request only if it is doable quite easily, since I assume I would be the only one to use this feature...

[manikus]

I would think that it would be difficult to to have the sprites sometimes on top of and sometimes below text in the same design if you are using the config.txt to do this...

And, I'm not sure that you're the only one that would use this - I have on my HD, a giant sprite-sized explosion image. I don't recall what I made it for, but I can tink of lots of places it could be useful.