Darkcoder
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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!
@peterigz wrote:
Yeh, with the thing I was saying about copying the texture out to the border I was referring to how timelinefx should be adding the border. And yes ignore what i was saying about clamping I was definitely getting confused there! 🙂
Ah, in that case, I was pretty much requesting the ability to select between these:
Maybe add in UV mirror too, for good measure. (though thinking about it I can’t actually think of any time where this would be useful in this scenario)
@peterigz wrote:
Anyway, almost all those features you mentioned in the first post are in now and ready for the next update, I’m trying to test it a bit before I release.
Awesome!
@peterigz wrote:
With regards to to the border, should you not just copy the pixels out to the edge (depending on the amount of border) ? But then if you do that it would lose its seamlessness? The same would happen if you copied from the opposite edge if you had a larger then 1 border. I think anyway… I might be getting confused (which I probably am!) but I’m starting to think that borders are only really useful for tilemaps, whereas this is just creating seamless textures which could be sorted by clamping uvs? or something…
Copying images out of the tile sheet is incredibly inefficient as it’ll require changing the texture between draw calls if each sprite uses a different frame, right now I can just change the UV for each rect(or vertex, for point sprites) and simply draw hundreds of animated particles in one go, which is very efficient. However, this also means that the whole animation is shared across the texture, so clamping doesn’t do anything useful. This is why having a border that has the tiling built in saves some computation, right now I’m offsetting the UVs into each cell by half a pixel so it’s not an issue for me. It just struck me as strange, as I don’t see how a transparent border would be useful. I’ve seen coloured(i.e. pink) borders used in complex animation sheets for characters and stuff, but these particle sheets always contain different sized cells, TimelineFX exports each cell as the same size so I’m not sure how useful such a border would be.
Can’t you first render the camera to a render target surface whose resolution is what I specify as the cell size and that’s applied to a rect that’s stretched over the screen and you just remove filtering on it? I have no idea what the editor is written in, but if it supports render targets and drawing sprites to them then there should be practically no overhead to doing this.
@peterigz wrote:
Thanks, I’m currently in “update mode” at the moment so I’ll try and stick as many of these changes in as possible, they seem to make sense. It’s always really helpful for me to hear these as I get so used to working with it myself it becomes harder to think outside the box! 🙂
Which is something I should learn to do with my games! (Especially where difficulty is concerned)
@peterigz wrote:
What do you mean with the preview slider btw? I put that in mainly for very large animations where the frame size doesn’t fit in the window, so you can just zoom out to see it all.
THIS image should illustrate what I’m on about.
@peterigz wrote:
I quick work around for the other zoom slider – once you clicked on it you can use the mouse wheel to move 1% at a time, but obviously the buttons would help.
I didn’t notice that, cool.
