Hi guys!
I'm an absolute noob here but I did have a look round the FAQ's and the Tutorial Wiki's for more info on character creation. I didn't manage to find an answer to the question I was looking for, so maybe someone here can help...
I'm just about to make a series of animations for my character... is there best size for the sprites, or is it unlimited? Also, do I stick to the same number of animations that Roger has, or can that number be increased?
Any advice would be gratefully received. Thank you.
It totally depends on the style you choose and your personal preference. I myself draw characters approximately 1/3 of the screen heigth, others make them smaller or larger.. the most important thing is that they correlate with the backgrounds you make and the resolution you use. I suggest drawing some backgrounds first and then see what size the characters should have to fit in.
You can make as many animations as you like. I think there's a limit for the frames per animation but it's high and shouldn't bother you. Edit: There's no limit for frames per loop!
Hi
Most of the character sprites i use are around 26 x 90.... This is basically just the character showing ie walking could be up to 50 x 90 full stride. You can make sprites at other sizes if you want to. .
Obviously with a variety of new characters its best to keep the sizes similar otherwise one could be a giant or tom thumb! There is also a manual scale command for any character. Walkable areas also dictate character sizes as well.
You can have as many animation views of a character as you want. To change the animation view simple change the characters view number.
Hope this helps
barefoot
That's great guys! I didn't want to go to the trouble of creating something then finding out I'd made too many animations, or that I had made them too small and could have made them bigger to increase the detail.
Thank you.
I'm not positive but i think it's around 14 frames for a view?
Nah, that would be quite a limitation! I just checked, there's no limit for loops per view or frames per loop.
Oops sorry, I thought one of the Densming videos mentioned that, this is good news, I'm glad I mentioned it, thanks for the info Matti. :-[
No problem. You can check all the limits in the help file under Reference > System limits.
How do you guys create your characters?
At the moment I have a full body human character withe the arms and legs as seperate layers in Photoshop. I then put it into After Effects and can animate the arms, but I'm having a real problem with the legs.
How do you do yours?
Hi
There are geometric ways of doing the body as well as arms, legs etc.
Well, some of us are pants at making character sprites...
I generally copy and paste good character sprites into a paint program (like photoshop) and look at how the legs work and try and do my own on my new character..
Practice and check out making/drawing characters on the internet.
barefoot
Okay. I went to a LOT of effort, but I've made an animated character that I am very pleased with, but when I import it into the spirte collection and I see him moving when I run my 'room', he is surroudned by 'garbage' pixels which I cannot find in my original animation frames. Does anyone know what I am doing wrong please?
Basically you are using images with alpha transparency in a game without.
Either clean up the edges of the sprites or change the game's color depth to 32bit and re-import them.
Some programs (like Photoshop) let you view only the alpha channel (turn off the R, G, and B channels), which can make it much easier to pick out these problems. Something else you could try is just create a new layer behind everything and flood-fill that layer to black (or something else that will give these problem areas a high level of contrast).
Thanks for the tips.
When I save my jpgs, photoshop automatically adds a white background, which is in contrast to the figure itself. I'll go through all my animation frames a look out for any "noise" around the figure and see if I can elimiate it.
JPGs! :o
Never, ever use JPG for anything other than photos you don't plan to edit later on.
It's evil. (It uses a compression algorithm that fucks up pixels and colors, adding artifacts in the process, and doesn't support transparency.)
Save your sprites as GIFs (single color transparency support, 256 colors) or PNGs (alpha transparency, millions of colors).
Never ever use JPGs, they screw up the image. Use PNGs instead, they are lossless and allow alpha channels.
Edit: Khris has beaten me, but I'm stating this once more anyway..
I tried using PNGs, but the alpha channel doesn't appear to be working properly. Do i need to make a layer or something before I save as PNG? At the moment I'm getting much worse background noise than with jpgs. I must not be doing something correct
Aha! It works brilliantly with gifs. No more mess!
Thanks guys!
Quote from: Matti on Fri 10/06/2011 16:39:18
You can make as many animations as you like.
I have 11 frames of animation for my character walking to the right. How do I tell the game to use 11 frames instead of 8 frames that "Roger" uses by default, please?
You don't have to tell AGS to use a certain amount of frames, AGS does that automatically.
Also, please don't multipost, you can edit your posts.
If a character has 11 frames in an animation view then it will run through all11..
IE 0 to 10..
barefoot
Quote from: Matti on Mon 27/06/2011 15:01:29
You don't have to tell AGS to use a certain amount of frames, AGS does that automatically.
Also, please don't multipost, you can edit your posts.
Sorry about that. I will edit my posts from now when I have updates.
I'm not sure I understand about what AGS does automatically. I can see Roger has 9 frames for walking. Are you saying if I add 10 frames it will use 10? I can't see how.
What's not to see?
AGS takes the character's NormalView and uses frame 0 of every loop as standing frame and all the other ones as walking animation.
It doesn't matter how many you put in there, AGS is perfectly capable of storing that number for further use, why wouldn't it be?
I'm sorry, maybe I'm completely misunderstanding your question, but I can't even remotely see why that would be a problem for the engine's own editor?
Quote from: AGS Help, System limits
30000 imported sprites
.
.
.
unlimited loops per view
unlimited frames per loop
You could potentially have a view with 1,000 loops, and 30,000 (maximum amount of imported sprites) frames per loop. When you tell AGS to animate one of those loops, it will go through
each and every one of those thirty-thousand frames. (@40 fps & delay = 1, it would take 12 minutes and 30 seconds to see that animation beginning to end. Absurd I know but AGS will let you do it.)
If only the object limit was more then 40...
Thanks for your patience guys. I really appreciate it.
I should probably explain what I'm doing then maybe you can tell me how I'm missing the apparently obvious.
I've double clicked Sprites in the top right window then right clicked the roger character frames and replaced them with my own.
Sprite number 2020 - 2029 are the Roger walking sprites. Then at 2030 it changes to a different animation of him walking up the screen. If I add more frames from 2030, as you say I can, won't the game use those extra frames to use the walk up the screen animation?
Maybe there is another way of doing this that I'm not getting right.
The sprite numbers don't matter at all and only importing sprites into the editor doesn't change the game at all (except for making it larger ;)). You need to insert sprites in the view's loops in order to change the animation (e.g make it longer).
Maybe you should go through the tutorial..
It looks like you completely missed the views portion of AGS.
Those are used to arrange sprites for the purpose of having animations.
It's in there where you set a loop's length and which sprites are in them and in what order.
They can hold more than one loop so you can organize your animation loops more efficiently, and in the case of walking views, there's a loop number for every walking direction.
Double-click Roger's walk view (I believe it's called "VIEW1") and in there you can freely assign sprites to the frames. You can remove frames, add new ones to the end, insert them, even flip them (so you don't have to draw a second side-view unless you want to).
It's up to you whether you're going to leave the roger sprites in the game or not, too.
The only thing you need to be careful with is renumbering or deleting sprites that are already assigned to something else in the editor, for instance as a GUI's background image or of course, to a frame in a view.
Every sprite is assigned using the sprite slot number, so replacing them is always fine.
Thanks Khris.
I found a very helpful video tutorial and you were absolutely right - I wasn't using the VIEW1 tab when adding my animations. Now I've seen how that is used, I've got my guy walking left and right (no up and down animations yet) and there is no pixellated mess around him.
Thanks everyone. I did try the FAQ's, but there's a LOT of information in there for a newbie, and I must have skipped over something or it wasn't included.
If you actually go through the tutorial included in the manual (the "Starting off" tutorial), there's an entire section of that tutorial devoted to this. It's part 7, "Getting Started with AGS - Part 7: Animations and cutscenes".
I'd also like to point out that simply using GIF is not an acceptable alternative to creating a proper alpha channel. If you ever want to use anti-aliasing in any of your sprites (to get "smooth" edges) then you're going to have to use PNG and you're going to have to create a proper alpha channel.
JPEG doesn't support alpha channels at all. If one exists it will be flattened and destroyed. Beyond that, since the format is lossy, it loses color information when you save your image. This can actually, especially when being paired with an improper alpha channel that has been flattened, cause artifacting in your image. It distorts the existing colors, and is therefore the worst possible format for using color- and pixel-sensitive images, such as for games.
GIF supports only 256 colors with 1-bit alpha transparency. Likely for individual images you shouldn't need 256 colors to begin with, and if you do then you might need to reconsider how you're creating these images. If for some reason an individual sprite did have more than 256 colors, it would cut it down to 256 colors, and generate dithering where colors had been removed. GIFs also don't support full alpha channels, so anti-aliasing is impossible in GIF images. GIF only supports full-opaque or fully-transparent pixels; you cannot have partially transparent pixels in a GIF image.
PNG supports full true-color images with full alpha-channel support. It's a lossless format which means whatever color your pixels are when you save the image is exactly the color they will be when you load your image back. Since it supports full alpha channels, you can have partially transparent pixels, which means you can have anti-aliasing which allows you to have smooth edges in your images. This is particularly relevant in higher resolution games. In my experience, it can even typically produce smaller images than JPEG, and without losing color information.
If you're seeing artifacts when you're saving a PNG image, it is because you are using an improperly created alpha channel which should be fixed.
How would I create an alpha channel for a PNG please? I'm assuming that the alpha channel would be the silouhette of my player character, is that correct?
The alpha channel is an additional channel that stores the transparency of every pixel. Its visual representation is usually a gray-scale image where white is 100% opaque and black is 100% transparent (or the other way 'round), with gray in between.
In photoshop, instead of painting on the layer called "Background", create a new layer and delete the Background. You should end up with the transparency grid (instead of a solid color). If you draw on that and save it as PNG, the alpha channel should end up in the file.
Edit: btw, in case this wasn't mentioned yet: in order to use sprites with alpha channel, you have to set the game's color depth to 32bit and re-import any alpha sprite (a 16bit setting makes AGS discard the alpha channel upon import).
Khris - you're a genius!! I do know quite a bit about alpha channels and I was at a loss to understand why my animations weren't working. I changed the colour set up to 32bit and my guy is disappearing perfectly now! The scripting thing you posted looked a little daunting to me at my present level of knowledge, so I'm delighted that I was able to get this to work with PNG's and alpha channels. Thank you, thank you!
Well... Bugger me sideways with a fish fork and bake me for quarter of an hour. :D
Khris has done it again. (can I marry your brain?)
I have tried searching and testing and pulling my hair out on how to do alpha channels.
It was so bloody simple. I use 'paint shop pro' and it works exactly the same.
Fantastic.
Jay.