I'm not sure if it's my lack of interest in the franchise or what but why does all this jumping around the screen appeal to people? It's too much to watch at one time. I can see how that sort of element would work in a fatality sort of situation but surely that's not how people fight in Dragonball Z?

Unless I'm completely off the mark, in which case please ignore me. I need sleep.

That background is far better, but screen shaking will make it look more polished. It'll give it that hard impact that you need to sell the effect. Don't just settle for one effect when two or three will make it look even better.

I'm having too much fun with this.

Bl4ck Adam wrote:

You're doing God's work with those particles

FTFY also MFW:

I like this one. Sort of a wormhole effect. I did kill Dream Seeker a few times trying to generate it. Thats five waves of 100 particles, each running from 10 to 13 frames.

I'm trying to work out a way to generate seamless transitions, but I'm either going to have to change my setup again, or just write a separate set of functions to handle that. And I still haven't figured out how to keep particles centered correctly if I stretch them in only one direction. Resizing 1/1 is fine, but anything else gets... funky...

EDIT: I can actually get stretching to work as long as I don't try to rotate as well.

Kats wrote:

That's weird. Shoot me a snippet sometime so I can help take a look at why rotation and turning isn't working. I actually had to fix this using a clever method that required me to create a blank matrix, interpolate that where the new frame should be and then set the image matrix to that, instead of just rotating or expanding the size of the current matrix. It was a fairly complicated juggling of the matrices to actually get it to work.

I'll see if I can't send you that snippet and see if that doesn't help, unless you're already doing that. 0.0

Well, as I mentioned, I'm not using any matrixes at all, but feel free to send me the snippet and I'll see what I can pry out of it :)

Otherwise, the particles look fantastic and I'm so glad you're having fun with them! You have no idea how awesome that makes me feel, truly it does.

Thanks, I appreciate the inspiration. There is still a fair chunk of your library buried in here, although I'm not sure how much you'd still recognize ;) My code is not the least bit pleasant to look at.

Flick wrote:

I'm having too much fun with this.

GTA2 Byond confirmed...

Okay, here's the way I solved it through animation overlays.



I first took the entire animation loop and made a copy of just the second half of it and overlayed that second half onto the first half of the original animation. I then clipped the last half off of the first animation and here I have a perfectly timed, two-step looping animation.

In this gif, I gave each layer a distinct color to be more easily distinguished and had the last four frames of each growing circle fade out smoothly. It produces the effect below. It's a wonderfully looped animation produced very easily by a single run animation like you're using.



There's some underlying mathematics that isn't too hard to figure out, but the gist is that depending on how many steps you want to make your animation, whether that's two, three, five, etc, the number of frames in the animation should be divisible by the number of steps you're wanting to overlay. You can always pull out a couple blank frames at the end to help you even this number up to a proper animation step, though, so it's nothing to really worry about. This animation is 16 frames, divisible by 2, which means it works.

Sexy sexy sexy. ;)

Well, I think I figured out what's killing DS. Once the memory footprint gets over about 1.5 gigs, it flakes out :P I'll need to see if I can cut back on that somehow.