Re: XARCHON 3D Character Theme going on

[capmikee@home.martnet.com]

On Mon, Jan 14, 2002 at 07:59:19AM +0100, Joerg Osarek wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I don't know if anybody remembers me. I started creating a 3D Character
> theme
> for XARCHON but I didn't get any farther than creating the dark basilisk
> and
> banshee which is used in the game right now.

I remember! I'm really excited to hear that a new theme is coming. We have code
that supports multiple themes, but it's not being used now. I can
imagine lots of improvements to it, but I haven't started thinking
about specifics yet.

> I discovered two major things:
> a) the character is pretty fast moving on my computer. 
>    (Pentium 2, 400 MHz, 196 MB Ram) Could that be slowed down?

Do you mean the animation speed? Right now all characters advance one
frame every time the game shows a frame. Rob Rendell came up with a
way for board frames to go slower than that - I think we need to look
at both pieces of code and come up with a way to set the animation
rate for any sprite. Perhaps each theme could contain some
configuration files that contain information like that.

Otherwise, perhaps you could make some in-between frames for your
animations to slow them down?

> b) the character is really looking tiny so that You cannot see lots of
>    details. This is a bit sad because it is looking much more
> interesting
>    with a higher resolution. Would it be possible to expand the size
>    for characters from 32by32 to 64by64 or 48by48?

I'd like this to be possible eventually, but I'm working on some other
stuff right now so I can't get to the graphics code.

Here's how I imagine the graphics working in future:

icons can be any size, and their position corresponds to the center
instead of the corner. This will make it much easier to make the
banshee and phoenix weapon sprites.

The whole game could have a size setting, and all icon sizes get
"multiplied" by that setting.

If anybody has their own ideas, or wants to work on graphics code, go
for it! Since Tzuk has made the graphics toolkit-independent, it ought
to be easier now.

Keep up the good work, Joerg! The knight looks great.

- Mike