FreeTrain

Grinder · Joined: 19 Aug 2007 Posts: 22 Location: Scotland

Hoping this works - could some kind person test this?

Cheers

himasaram · Developer Joined: 01 May 2007 Posts: 79

Very nice! It seems to be working fine and fits in well with the graphical style of many of the later Japanese buildings. Looking forward to seeing more of your work!

Grinder · Joined: 19 Aug 2007 Posts: 22 Location: Scotland

Thanks Himasaram. Very Happy

Will start on something new as soon as my PC is fixed (by Wednesday hopefully). It died at 5am yesterday Sad

I think it might be the PSU that went as there was a loudish 'pop' - then the dreaded Silence Of The Fans. Having to use my son's PC to post this in between his lengthy Runescape sessions.

steven_h · Posted: Sun Aug 26, 2007 11:11 pm Post subject:

Heh heh... a capacitor... they're easy to replace, but of course, they usually blow because something else has caused them to screw up Smile

And BTW, your building looks fantastic... would love to see this evolve into a fully fledged set Cool

Grinder · Joined: 19 Aug 2007 Posts: 22 Location: Scotland

steven_h wrote:

Heh heh... a capacitor... they're easy to replace, but of course, they usually blow because something else has caused them to screw up Smile

Overuse and dust was probably the reason. A new Antec 650W is now powering my creaking PC and is of a better standard than the old Antec 430W.

steven_h wrote:

And BTW, your building looks fantastic... would love to see this evolve into a fully fledged set Cool

Thanks

If we can get the sprite alpha channel sorted then it will a lot easier to work on a full set. As it stands, it's not possible to do anti-aliased rail tracks and other fine detail. In the mean time I'll stick to buildings.

steven_h · Posted: Wed Aug 29, 2007 11:29 pm Post subject:

Grinder wrote:

If we can get the sprite alpha channel sorted then it will a lot easier to work on a full set. As it stands, it's not possible to do anti-aliased rail tracks and other fine detail. In the mean time I'll stick to buildings.

You could only do this with PNG files yes? that have the separate channel per pixel? I've just realised what you mean by this...
Did FreeTrain ever have the capability, or is this something new?
I can sorta imagine how it would fit in the SDL branch... but I've no idea how the whole alphablending lib works in the DirectDraw stuffs.

Makes sense now... those rail tracks need to have 'smoothened' pixels and of course, if you smoothen the 255,0,255 then you get a hideous pink.

Interesting... I might have a look at this sooner than later and try and get it into the standard branch first. I suppose firstly I'd need to work out what image formats support an alpha channel, seeing as that it needs to be per pixel and you wouldn't want to have to specify this in the XML.

Grinder · Joined: 19 Aug 2007 Posts: 22 Location: Scotland

steven_h wrote:

You could only do this with PNG files yes? that have the separate channel per pixel? I've just realised what you mean by this...

There are a few file formats that support an alpha channel (typically RGBA format). PNG, Targa (TGA) and TIFF. GIF also supports transperency but is limited to paletted colours.

steven_h wrote:

Did FreeTrain ever have the capability, or is this something new? I can sorta imagine how it would fit in the SDL branch... but I've no idea how the whole alphablending lib works in the DirectDraw stuffs.

Makes sense now... those rail tracks need to have 'smoothened' pixels and of course, if you smoothen the 255,0,255 then you get a hideous pink.

This was the source of my early problems when trying to mask off those anti-aliased pixels from the background. You can just about get away with it on large areas.

steven_h wrote:

Interesting... I might have a look at this sooner than later and try and get it into the standard branch first. I suppose firstly I'd need to work out what image formats support an alpha channel, seeing as that it needs to be per pixel and you wouldn't want to have to specify this in the XML.

I wish I could help more, but don't know any programming. I could research details on the image formats and stuff like that if you wish?

charlieg · Site Admin Joined: 29 Apr 2007 Posts: 80

PNG it the widely supported standard that we should use. If it only works with the SDL branch, that's ok - we have to move the project forwards and I think we can mandate that pre-SDL is legacy and unsupported (once the SDL branch is fully functional, of course).

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