[CF-Devel] RE: new red dragon image

Fri May 23 06:19:07 CDT 2003

>

      I think the different images we have for different dragons are the way to

     >

      go. The new electric dragon, e.g., looks very nice; so does the chinese

     >

      dragon. And Todd(?)'s bone drake is a nicely done dragon image as well. I

     >

      wouldn't want to see the same image with different colors for these

     >

      dragons.

If I knew dragons was where the fame was - I would have worked on them
sooner.
I didn't do the bone drake, so no glory there, but i could try a dragon soon
too.
This is a nice animation, I am itching to steal and modify it already for
other applications (hmmmm bend out the spine, wrap the tail a bit, add some
wing, a few nasty horns...)  I would rather do this than just recolour this
one

>

     I think part of the problem is that the procedure for adding new

     >

     animations is not well documented. For example, I still have no idea how

     >

     to convert some new images I have to a tile format that CF can use, nor

     >

     how to associate it with an arch.

The file format is 32x32 pixel tiles of PNG format (I personally also like
256 bit or 16 bit colour over RGB to keep the files as small as possible,
but that's just me)
I have heard legends of single image multi tile creatures, but never seen
one - so there you go - chop em into bits.

The documentation is fairly good compared to most things.  It is fairly
straightforeward, but a lot of precision work.  You can figure it out by
looking over a couple arches and reading the objects file in the server
developer docs directory (Rick Tanner posted this doc on the CF site I
think).  Basically you add a section to the arch called anim which contains
a list of the files in the animation.  You can add a facings value to split
the list into directional sublists (e.g. facings 2 is left-right) which
comprise equal chunks of the full list.  For example fo make a two part
animation with two directions you would have:

anim
facings 2
part.131
part.132
part.171
part.172
mina

so you have four animations 131 and 132 are two pics of facing left and 171
172 are two pics facing right
mina closes the animation list.  The 1 is the first animation frame and the
2 is the second.

You can get fancier, a two part creature has two tiles per frame per
direction:
Object part_1
[.]
anim
facings 2
part.131
part.132
part.171
part.172
mina
end
more
Object part_2
anim
facings 2
part.231
part.232
part.271
part.272
mina
[.]

getting the arches into the game is simple, make a soft link in your server
source code directory /lib folder to the location of your arch directory (or
copy the arch directory inthe lib folder , you have to download the arches
to do this btw) and run 'make collect' and it will generate a new set of
compiled arches for you.
Make sure the server is stopped so it can install them and  run 'make
install' to install the files into your sevver. Restart and enjoy.

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