Offsets and BBoxes

[CE]

Reposted from BoR Revolution / BoR Generation:


If you want to ease your work with the offsets, you could create a template for all your sprites.

You create a default GIF in that pink color that's big enough to carry all your smaller enemies and playable characters. In Adobe Photoshop (I also use Corel Photopaint) you copy all your characters in there and adjust their position around one single offset.
Then you export all frames to GIFs.

If you do the same for the bigger enemies, you should only ever need to define two offsets for all your characters. One for the smaller ones and one for the bigger ones.

You sometimes even can use the same bboxes for certain enemies and characters.

Faster Offset Adjustment

Procedure:just take all your sprites or frames, whatever, and make a generic size for all of them, usually for me it's 150 x 150 on small ones, 200 x 200 for bigger ones, and try 1st making the idle animation somewhere , then use the same idle offset you make before for making all other animations...by doing this, you just have to use the same offset (and also maybe bbox's) values for every single animation in your characters' txt, saving LOTS of time. I'll try to post later an example, but you can always check my mods and my characters' txt, they all use the same offset and bbox almost on every animation . for adjusting the 1st offset and bbox, Photoshop seems to be the best program for BoR modders so far, plus , the onnion skin feature always help on getting perfect coordinates for all animations according to the 1st offset value you made.

You'll be very pleased to see how great it works once you really got all offsets set up properly.

[Damon Caskey]

This is exactly how I set my dudes up. It also has a side effect of making your sprites easy to adapt into other things, like this movelist: http://www.caskeys.com/arc/games/ryo_0001.html

All I had to do was run a batch to make a copy of the sprites with the pink made transparent, then edit in some of the visual effects. Took like 10 minutes. Really people, listen to this one. You have no idea how much of a headache you are giving yourself trying to use offsets to fix sprites of differing sizes.

I might also add if you think ultra cropped sprites are saving you memory, you had better think again; in fact the opposite is probably true. Every single thing you add to a text file, including offsets, uses some ram. Each one is just a tiny bit, but they add up fast. Having a ton of offsets can make an entity leave a much bigger footprint then it should.

DC

[CE]

I am not sure about the offsets adding up in RAM (as they are always there, no matter if they're the same or not).

But yeah, Offsets/BBoxes/Attackboxes are by far the most important thing in BoR modding and all will be MUCH easier to set up using this method. So, I probably should sticky this one...

Really people, listen to this one. You have no idea how much of a headache you are giving yourself trying to use offsets to fix sprites of differing sizes.

[Bloodbane]

 Just adding tip.
 If you can't set offset or unsure about offsetting yet, ENABLE shadow preferably the old style one (not gfxshadow). Seeing shadow location is best way to check if offset is placed correctly or not.

[kobra k]

Do you think 320x240 is too big?

[Damon Caskey]

It really doesn't matter all that much, but personally, I find 200*200 suits my needs perfectly. It leaves plenty of room for all but the biggest poses/sprites, it's easy to deal with mathematically, and is still a reasonably small image. You can use whatever you want to, but bigger files mean bigger packs, and smaller files mean more difficulty with offsets. 200*200 is the happy medium for me, but your needs may be different.

DC