Support of animated sprites for CEG's

[Karl]

Why: Because explosion would look cooler and you need way less particles for it
and how it could be used:

either by Sprite sheet or .apng support
commands might be like

SSscaleY/X: used for defining the single sprite size like
SSamount: used for defining how many frame a sheet has



vidya:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyGxtbko2Jc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXNxa2iq_wE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zG5aLviO0fM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLlWb6Y17GI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpRcDQQfda0

inb4 use dirty spawn ceg hack

if no, I accept hamster's as currency

[smoth]

I would like to see it but since I don't have a patch have this:

[PicassoCT]

Animated Explosions have proofen themselves to be a dead end..
Actually in my early days i believed in 3d-animated polygons.. more Morphers..

I myself belived into the 2d once, but then knowledge came:

- bitmaps dont adapt themselves to improving technical circumstances (better light calculation) or sudden improvements in unitphysix
- real explosions are glowing clouds of gas..
- such pictures only hold up in the distance (where there only point is.. baking down lups explos into far away bitmas explosions sounds like fun..)
- bitmaps always look the same, which looks very strange..
- spring allready used them for basic explosions?

[Karl]

Animated Explosions have proofen themselves to be a dead end..
Actually in my early days i believed in 3d-animated polygons.. more Morphers..

Well it would be nice to see that Spring RTS would support bones if that is what you mean but I guess we don't see it in the near future... but atleast it is easily moddable.
So I guess a good trade-off more or less.

- bitmaps dont adapt themselves to improving technical circumstances (better light calculation) or sudden improvements in unitphysix

particle effects never affected the physics[?]
but however it is possible that particle effects gets affected by environmental actions generally speaking.

- such pictures only hold up in the distance (where there only point is.. baking down lups explos into far away bitmas explosions sounds like fun..)
- bitmaps always look the same, which looks very strange..
- spring allready used them for basic explosions?

-I dont understand?

-Well that problem would be easily solved by adding randomized bitmap selection,
ie as in "sprite1.png sprite5.png etc..."

-Spring never had a support for animated explosion,
through yet TA had them obviously which for some reason the old Devs back then din't added support for them

I would like to see it but since I don't have a patch have this:

that is adequate

[Anarchid]

Well it would be nice to see that Spring RTS would support bones if that is what you mean but I guess we don't see it in the near future... but atleast it is easily moddable.
So I guess a good trade-off more or less.

Animating explosions with rigged meshes is insanity.

[PicassoCT]

Well it would be nice to see that Spring RTS would support bones if that is what you mean but I guess we don't see it in the near future... but atleast it is easily moddable.
So I guess a good trade-off more or less.

Animating explosions with rigged meshes is insanity.

insanity? You dont say...

[zwzsg]

through yet TA had them obviously which for some reason the old Devs back then din't added support for them

TA has a fixed direction camera. Spring has a rotatable camera. When you change the viewpoint while watching an animated 2D sprite, the illusion is broken an you see the flatness of it.

[Karl]

Well you could use a sprite that has only a explosion (or anything else) in it
take out all the fancy stuff like sparks out from it and make sparks via cegs instead,
which should make it pseudo-3d like effect with some of it's sprite that is animated.

IMO way better looking then a simple "frozen" particle

[Anarchid]

Some Spring games actually use what are, in effect, monosprite explosions (emulated via CEG chains). Example: ZK Hammer, Ravager and Hermit projectiles explode in a sprite.

It doesn't actually look that ugly and "flat" because the "heatcloud" particle always faces the camera.

Currently implementing such "ceg chain animations" requires a proverbial ton of boilerplate though, so i guess it could be a nice feature to have.

insanity? You dont say...

I say full well! I can measure this madness against my own, and it scores 2.12.

[knorke]

Not really about new feature, but if you want just pretend it is a hamster picture:
Anarchid with "chain animations" and Karl with "dirty spawn ceg hack" mean the same thing.
So yes it is possible but:

http://code.google.com/p/zero-k/source/ ... ry_sue.lua
The files of CEGs like this look so ugly because they are just the .tdf files converted to .lua synthax. Or even if they are new ones they are still written in the same old style, without using the advantages.

For example if the sprites are named boom1,boom2,...boom8 then it would already be possible to make a CEG instead look like this:

Code: Select all

texture="boom"
pictures = 8
frameDelay=10
--some bla loop that builds the tables--

Yes, some things are still not possible with that.
Maybe some cegs are already made like this but never saw one.

[Karl]

Yes, some things are still not possible with that.

That's why I asked for a native sprite support without doing the unnecessary hassle work which is also time consuming
oh yeah so you can use them more actively instead of traditional spring way

through I prefer a sprite sheet variant, way better to organize stuff IMO..

> http://www.artbeats.com/collections/206 ... plosions-1
if you are a richie rich...I wonder what kind of tools they used for it
through those prices are a typical industrial software/plugin range

> http://favoniangamers.files.wordpress.c ... losion.jpg
ridiculous jeep explosion as they stuffed like 1-2 oil barrels on them

+Most newer RTS'es uses sprite explosion in particle style to achieve a higher degree of "petroleum/oil-barrel realism" so that they look better without using too much particles