Drawn and scanned character disappears in background SOLVED

[personalinsanity]

First of all, I apologize if this is in the wrong place.

I am making my first game, and decided to draw all my characters and backgrounds in black and white, as its set in a monochromatic world. When I imported and animated my character and put her in the room, alot of her turned transparent. I thought it was because when I imported it, the program read the white color around her, and therefore inside her too, as the transparent color. Then I colored the part around her red and all that did was add a read "aura/outline" to her. Any help would be appreciated to make her solid once more. Thanks.

[Matti]

You can tell AGS exactly what color should be transparent:

Then I colored the part around her red and all that did was add a read "aura/outline" to her. Any help would be appreciated to make her solid once more.

That sounds like you didn't properly save the file (e.g. used a jpg or some other stupid format) or that you used a smooth brush and didn't fill the area in exactly one color.

[monkey0506]

If you're using non-anti-aliased (pixelated) sprites, then you'll need to use a single, solid-coloured transparency that is not used anywhere in your sprites that are not transparent, such as 0xFF0000 (pure red).

If you're using anti-aliased sprites (ie., sprites with "soft" edges), you will want to use your paint program to make the transparent areas completely transparent (typically this will show a grey/white grid in most popular programs).

Either way I'd recommend you save your images to PNG format. Formats such as JPG and GIF are lossy, meaning they actually lose information about your images when they are saved. Usually for low-colour sprites (< 256 colours) GIF won't cause issues, but if you ever tried saving a high colour image (such as a photograph) as GIF, you'd experience dithering, which can sometimes look quite bad.

In contrast, the PNG format is lossless, meaning that it does not lose any colour information when saving your images. Furthermore, I've quite often found that PNG compression can regularly result in a smaller file size than JPG.

So, yeah, what Matti said.

Make sure if you are using anti-aliased sprites that you import them using the sprites' alpha channels with the "No transparency" setting. Otherwise, make sure you select a pixel that is the colour you selected for the transparent colour.

[personalinsanity]

Thanks guys, this helped alot.