New Update v1.24
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A new update is available with a whole bunch of features/tweaks! Some of the new feature might need tweaking a bit, but I thought I may as well get the update out there so I can get any feedback. Here’s the list of changes:
* Added Jpeg format to animation export
* You can now also export effects as gif animations
* There’s now a lot more formats available when importing shapes from .BMP to .DDS
* Added option to cap the FPS of the preview window to the monitor refresh rate. See the Preview Menu.
* Added Import Shape and Import Animation to the Shape tab pop up menu
* Any attributes that no longer have the default value will show an asterisk next to them to better indicate which ones are used.
* Fixed a bug causing the window to reposition incorrectly when closing the program whilst minimised.
* Fixed a bug with interpolated mode causing velocity not to register at all in some cases.
* Replaced progress bars with busy dialogues as they seemed to be causing some problems on some PCs. There is still a progress bar when rendering though, so we will see how that goes.
* Added new export option to save animations with 4×4 anti aliasing.
* Animation zoom level now updates properly when tabbing away.
* There is now a new menu option on the animation dialogue pop up menu – Extra Settings. This brings up an extra settings window with 2 check boxes: Resizing (using the -/+ buttons) automatically scales the effect as well, and an option to make the auto-fit function force the effect to remain centred.
* You can now preview seamless animations to check how well they tile. See the pop up menu to access it.
* You can now double click on the random seed button to automatically get a new seed and update the animation.
* The update button on the animation dialogue is now disabled until it needs to actually be used.
* The zoom text box now has a spinner control to change the zoom level 1% at a time.
* Changed how adding a border to the animation works when exporting. You can either add a 1 pixel transparent border, a 1 pixel border that copies the frame out to the edge (non-seamless), and a 1 pixel border that copies from the opposite side of the texture (Seamless). Needs testing some more though!
* You can now specify the number of columns a sprite sheet has when exporting an animation. Default is automatic.
* Fixed a bug causing a crash when cloning an effect whose name only contained numbers.
* Fixed a bug causing duplicate effects to be created when dragging an effect with the same effect.
* You can now increase the rate at which effects are updated. Change this using the preview menu and the updates per second option. 30fps will be enough for most effects, but some effects where you need to spawn a lot of particles that move in the same direction for example, a higher update rate can stop particles spawning on top of each other. Bear in mind that the higher the updates per second, the more performance required if there are a lot of particles.Awesome stuff, it’ll be a little while until I un-break my game so I can test this some more, but a few small things that could do with changing that I noticed are:
– The preview seamless effect settings aren’t saved(same for the export settings?), though this may not be required if:
– The preview seamless effect window doesn’t update when you change effect settings and hit update, right now you have to close it and open it again, which is pretty annoying because of the previous issue
– The preview seamless effect window opens even if you hit cancel
– I think the preview seamless effect should just be called: Preview Effect, and it should work on non-seamless textures too, because otherwise you can’t see the effect the 4xAA, colour, frame skip etc options have that easily.
– The greyscale option output looks wrong, are you calculating the brightness or the luminance? As it really should be the latter, right now the output looks darker than the colour version.
Anyway, keep up the good work!
Maybe I am doing something wrong but when exporting to an animated gif the background is black instead of transparant. ❓
At the moment gif’s are saved without transparency, and maybe the best I could do would be to add an option to be able to change the background colour to anything your want. If you change the background to white, then it will save onto a white background.
I use use a library called freeimage to create the gifs, so I’ll have to take a look at the docs more closely. First I have to quantize the the animation into an 8bit colour palette, which can only be done with 24bit images, ie., images without transparency. I assume you’re looking to add the gifs to a web site? unfortunately gifs don’t have great transparency anyway as it’s only really a mask, rather then true transparency like PNGs so I’m not even sure how good it would look anyway, but I’ll keep looking. Might be really simple! 🙂
thanks for including the DDS format and many other changes! I’m so happy I bought your particle editor, I use it almost every day at work 😀
[edit] added a section to showcase 🙂
No problem giz. Your game looks great! You could put some more pics on the showcase forum 😀
I just made a new update to version 1.25 just to clean up some bits from the previous version. I didn’t manage transparency on gifs as the results just weren’t very good. But I did introduce the ability to change the background colour of the animation to anything you want, so you can at least match the background colour you’re putting the gif onto. I think this is the best you can hope for from gifs really.
Here’s all the changes:
* Export options within the animation controls are now remembered for each effect
* Stopped the effect preview window from opening even though cancel is pressed
* You can now preview the rendered effect whether or not it’s seamless.
* Greyscale export now correctly exports according to Rec. 709 standards
* You can now change the background colour of animations to anything you want. Select Chose Colour from the pop up menu.
* The effect preview window for the animation dialog is now modal. If you want to make changes you have to close it first, not 100% ideal but atleast the export options are now remembered.I notice you added TPA to the file export, any chance in adding TGA 32bit in there too? PNG includes the alpha channel also, but Targa is a great standard format too.
Thanks
-Lee
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