Castlevania Dungeon Forums

The Castlevania Dungeon Forums => Fan Stuff => Topic started by: Esco on August 04, 2011, 07:12:20 PM

Title: Castlevania: SOTN Hacked - competition:who can come up with a new damage effect?
Post by: Esco on August 04, 2011, 07:12:20 PM
Well to make a long story short it appears that duplicating the rotating color effect when enemies are damaged in SOTN is very possible.... but takes up so many resources that it would slow the game down to like 20 FPS. I tried messing around with color blending, additive blending, surfaces, etc. and cannot come up with an effect that I like to replace it. But seeing as how I am not much of an artist that doesn't say much.   :-\

So, with that being said I of course need a new effect for when enemies are damaged. And since I know that a TON of people on here have some serious artistic skills I figured why not make a thread here and see what you guys and gals come up with.

The rules are simple:

1)Put up a screenshot of your damage effect; it should be an animated image not a still one so that we can all see how good it looks animated.
2)It must be an effect that can be applied to all enemies in the game; nothing monster specific please.
3)It cannot be an effect that requires me coding something to replace colors one by one (GM is lousy at this and it drains too many resources).

The creator of the effect that gets chosen will get full credit for their work, as well as being given the option of being one of the first people to beta test the game when the time comes. Anyone can put something up as many times as they want.

EDIT: here is the original effect from SOTN:

(http://i143.photobucket.com/albums/r160/Esco1979/BLINKINGZ.gif)
Title: Re: Castlevania: SOTN Hacked - competition:who can come up with a new damage effect?
Post by: Inccubus on August 04, 2011, 09:46:24 PM
One thing, though. The original damage effect for SotN came in a bunch of elemental flavors. SO the effects they create should have an interchangeable color scheme, right?
Title: Re: Castlevania: SOTN Hacked - competition:who can come up with a new damage effect?
Post by: Esco on August 04, 2011, 10:10:29 PM
One thing, though. The original damage effect for SotN came in a bunch of elemental flavors. SO the effects they create should have an interchangeable color scheme, right?

Yes; but changing colors is easy.
Title: Re: Castlevania: SOTN Hacked - competition:who can come up with a new damage effect?
Post by: Viper on August 04, 2011, 10:29:50 PM
Aah, familiar problem. Also didn't find a solution yet. Looking for ideas here...
Title: Re: Castlevania: SOTN Hacked - competition:who can come up with a new damage effect?
Post by: Inccubus on August 04, 2011, 10:43:28 PM
The ghetto solution would be to give each enemy sprite additional frames specifically for the damage effect, but then that could potentially slow your load times with a crap load of extra images. I think the best approach would be to use some sort of alpha blended overlay effect by utilizing surfaces & shapes.
Title: Re: Castlevania: SOTN Hacked - competition:who can come up with a new damage effect?
Post by: Esco on August 04, 2011, 11:00:59 PM
As I said above bro: pics please.  :)
Title: Re: Castlevania: SOTN Hacked - competition:who can come up with a new damage effect?
Post by: Inccubus on August 05, 2011, 03:26:11 AM
I'll see what I can come up with after I finish the sprites I'm working.
Title: Re: Castlevania: SOTN Hacked - competition:who can come up with a new damage effect?
Post by: Esco on August 06, 2011, 02:54:54 AM
Is this it? One person? Let me put this another way:

THE SOONER I HAVE A NEW DAMAGE EFFECT FOR THE GAME, THE SOONER I CAN MOVE FORWARD, AND THE SOONER IT GETS DONE AND YOU CAN ALL PLAY IT! ;)

I hope that clarifies things a bit.  ;D Lol
Title: Re: Castlevania: SOTN Hacked - competition:who can come up with a new damage effect?
Post by: Pemburu Vampir on August 06, 2011, 03:22:00 AM
How soon exactly?
Title: Re: Castlevania: SOTN Hacked - competition:who can come up with a new damage effect?
Post by: Gemini on August 06, 2011, 07:51:02 AM
Like... Tomorrow! No, even better: yesterday!

Yes; but changing colors is easy.
Like dynamically changing a palette and it affects the results on screen?
Title: Re: Castlevania: SOTN Hacked - competition:who can come up with a new damage effect?
Post by: thernz on August 06, 2011, 08:04:27 AM
Game Maker doesn't have palette support.
Title: Re: Castlevania: SOTN Hacked - competition:who can come up with a new damage effect?
Post by: Gemini on August 06, 2011, 12:54:41 PM
Doesn't it even support shaders or DirectX/OpenGL low-level programming (or anything similar)? Palette swapping can be done super fast with that.
Title: Re: Castlevania: SOTN Hacked - competition:who can come up with a new damage effect?
Post by: Inccubus on August 06, 2011, 01:10:38 PM
Hmmm... There are a lot of dlls that have been made into extensions for GM.
*Runs to GM forums to search*
Title: Re: Castlevania: SOTN Hacked - competition:who can come up with a new damage effect?
Post by: Esco on August 06, 2011, 08:48:14 PM
Doesn't it even support shaders or DirectX/OpenGL low-level programming (or anything similar)? Palette swapping can be done super fast with that.

It uses directx and opengl but the only function to really change colors is done pixel by pixel and this is very slow since it must read then write (it does not support palettes..... yes I was surprised too). I wrote someone on the forums since he mentioned a way of exporting the pal data to eternal ini/txt files then just having to rewrite based on the values in the file (which would be way  quicker) but until he gets back to me I am lost on how to do it.

That method could work though since I could set it to make the file ONLY if it doesn't exist. So I could then distribute it to everyone and the palette date needs to only be made once per enemy. Then writing to it and replacing the colors should be MUCH quicker since I can run a quick for loop with an if statement to do it every 2 or 3 steps.