Character PNG Format HELP!!! :cries:

Is their a way to have your characters PNG format on your BOR Mod, and have it work, I really need it....

Why don't you just convert them to a format that is supported?

Just wondering as a guest here, but why doesnt the whole engin support only pngs? it looks much nicer, easier for color changes in a lot of respects, and most other 2d games use them aswell. GIF has all of that horrid colour distortion

Color distortion?

Gif only uses 256 colours, and has a habbit of changing the look of things by adding different coloured pixels on the animation. im just saying i dont see why the game doesnt just support png as it is more widly used, and a smaller file format.

i have always used pngs in games because usually it is best to get every bit of extra space possible. gif files have always edited the colors when i save them as animations, ad it never gives options to turn them off. ms paint obviously does this to extremes because it is crap with saving, like saving a JPEG in paint, has really bad quality. imageready always saves animations to look normal, but still adds in the odd pixels across random areas of the picture. thats what ive always found.

i just wondered why png's werent used instead of gifs because they are more globally used, and are generally smaller.

PNG is a lossless compression format so they aren't really smaller. In fact they are as huge as BMPs when decompressed in RAM.

Regarding your problems with GIF, try this tutorial for some nice colorful graphics in your mod: http://borrevolution.vg-network.com/tutorial.htm

im talking about animation here using adbe imagready. and i know pngs are as big as bmp when decompressed in game, its the size of the game i mean. in industry they use png for 2d graphics more than anything because of its clearness and the fact that it is so small on disc.

no, but my uncle is, and im currently being taught to do 3d models by the lead artist at EA games, Redwood, CA.

I am currently making a game very simlar to streets of rage in the way it works, and we are using true color pngs. i didnt mean pngs for animation, i meant gif. whenever i save an animation as a gif, it always does dithering and doesnt let it stop it. the game engine animates pngs for us literally by going through them one after the other, but can only save a png animation as an .exe....but thats erelevent.

i know EA arent exactly god's gift, and im not a big fan of thier games either, but they are the worlds biggest game corporation, closesly follwed by activision. (who gave up tenchu to sega damn them!)

also, im sorry for making a bad start on this forum by arguing with admin...not very sociable i know

You should probably check this out then.  Someone has already started work based on BoR using PNG format.  Though I slightly looked at the code and it seems he has removed allot of the bor scripting for hardcoded commands......  I wonder why..?!?




LoL...  forgot the link:  http://sourceforge.net/projects/paintown

Game compaines make new game engines practically ever other week! Every game engine is different, according to the game it is being made to make. OpenBOR was obviously designed to use GIF files for all of the graphics, or at least most of them. If you make the game engine use PNGs as it's primary image files to load, there is no problem. If you started to want to use GIFs, it probally wouldnt like it, and you would have to hard-code it all in aswell. Our game engine is currently supporting PNGs, FPGs (A spanish format by Bomber Games), Gif, JPEG. The only one used for in game graphics like maps, character sprite sets, animations and so on, are PNGs. JPEG is only used for still images in high resolution games...or at least thats what the plan was when we implimernted them. FPGs don't need t be supported anymore because we made them all into PNGs now so the pixle color changers can react to them, and GIFs were being using for small animated scenes. But now we are just going to use the actual game engine to do animated scenes.

So basically, what im trying to say is, every game engine is very different. OpenBOR wasn't desinged for using PNGs, it was designed for GIFs. so changing that could cause bugs in areas, it could also mean that to get them to work properly, you have to hard-code it in.

Actually BoR was designed for using 8-bit image data. It really doesn't matter to the engine whether this data is loaded from GIF, PCX, BMP or PNG (if PNG support is added). There is no "primary" format as far as the code is concerned. However, since the original game used only GIFs, it's the safest choice as they're guaranteed to work in every port and version.

We have only stuck to FPGs and PNGs for characters and levels because they are the easiest to do color changes to the characters as they come on screen. we also plan to do real-time pixle changes so when you walk past a window, your pixles colours will change accordingly, by making the inner pixels darker, and the surrounding, lighter.