ID:181526
 Apr 8 2010, 12:12 pm
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Do you think it would make a game look better if all the icons where pictures with a transparent background created with Macromedia Flash, or Adobe Flash? Because you can create a "32x32" picture or even bigger then import it to BYOND's Dream Maker. Getting back to the point, do you think it would enhance a games graphics and players/audience?
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I'm saying that, When you make an image/picture via Flash, you get the choice's of saving it as an, HTML, FLASH, PNG, JPG, and other formats, if you saved it as a "PNG" which to the best of my knowledge has the best quality. Then you can import pictures/images into BYOND easily, hence giving your icon a better quality. As in "quality" I mean making it less "blocky" as the BYOND icon editor seems to create "blocky-ness".
Long story short; you can make your icons via Flash and publish them as PNG's then import it to BYOND's Dream Maker. Question still out there, would it enhance game performance (popularity wise)? | |
But Flash is itself not an image editor. You can create PNG files with any number of programs that are specifically designed for such a purpose. It sounds like you want to display a frame of an animation in Flash and save it as a PNG just for the sake of taking advantage of any built-in anti-aliasing features. A decent image editor though already does any of this much better. Basically you're trying to use a wrench as a hammer--it may get the job done but it isn't the right tool.
Since proper image editors are already widely available, your question has already been answered. People who care about their icon quality and are not going for a pixel art kind of look are already in a position to use such editors. Many RPG games do not, because they actually want the pixel art look. Lummox JR | |
I've used Flash once for a better-quality title because of how it straightens out the lines (to a degree) but that was when I was trying to go for a handwriting appearance for an actual image o.0 I would never use it for icons.
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Gizhy wrote:
Do you think it would make a game look better if all the icons where pictures with a transparent background created with Macromedia Flash, or Adobe Flash? Because you can create a "32x32" picture or even bigger then import it to BYOND's Dream Maker. Getting back to the point, do you think it would enhance a games graphics and players/audience? I'm assuming you mean anti-aliasing, which can be done in any number of image manipulation programs. Sometimes it looks good, sometimes it doesn't. | |
When you zoom in your flash created image it will have "blocky-ness" too, there's nothing you can do about it. It's not 3D where you can create pixels out of where when you increase resolution =/
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Well, the problem with that is.. When you play a BYOND game you don't "zoom in" so you won't be able to see the "blocky-ness".
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Actually, you're talking about vector images, which can be achieved in 2D (see the SVG format, for example). 3D can be zoomed in a lot and retain smoothness (to an extend, though generally there's a polygon limit), but the texture applied to an object will be raster, not vector, so you'll eventually see pixels when you zoom in far enough on it.
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Inkscape is a free vector image editor, and really sounds like what you want. Vector graphics work in some cases but not in others. BYOND doesn't support vector graphics in their native format, such as SVG, so you have to convert them to a raster format, such as PNG. In this conversion you retain all quality at a single scale, but upscaling or downscaling doesn't get the advantages of SVG.
Vector graphics work by defining points and connections so the program can scale without any loss in quality. Raster images work by defining each pixel's(or groups of pixels) color. This means to scale it you must simply scale the pixel position and count, but this means that shrinking it down will cause some pixels to disappear and scaling it up will simply multiply the number of pixel per defined pixel block. Sure, you can alias the scaled image, which helps, but causes the "burry" image effect. | |
Shaders can perform smoothing by adding extra vertexes, as well as creating models out of texture, yet again, it's all about speed, isn't it?
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If you want my advice, i only use 64x64 icons in my games, it allows for a lot of extra detail to be seen in them, plus they remain the same size...well as long as you remember to insert
world as for importing, i think thats a much better idea than creating it with the BYOND icon maker tools. not only is it faster but they look a hell of a lot better. | |
Lummox JR