GearHead Mock-up

[SharkD]

I did a mock-up in HTML of what GearHead might look like if it supported the alpha channel. You'll need an SVG browser plugin to view it.

You can find it here.

[Tung Nguyen]

Any screenshots? It freezes Firefox.

I took a look inside the SVGs, because I thought something might be wrong with them. They weren't displaying thumbnails in Nautilus, OO.o Draw didn't want to touch them, Eye of GNOME didn't either. Jumped inside with my text editor: the SVGs just reference the PNGs.

Why not just use PNGs directly?

[SharkD]

I tested it in Firefox (on Windows), and it worked fine for me. It does take a while to load--and, it did run much slower in Firefox than IE--so, maybe you just need to wait a while longer for it to load. I didn't use the PNGs directly because IE doesn't support the alpha channel in PNGs properly.

Here's screenshot:

[SharkD]

Here's an update.



You'll notice that Size Factor now makes a much more visible difference.

Also, I worked out a method of dithering images in order to simulate alpha transparency. I discuss the method in this page in the wiki. Now, antialiasing/transparency is no longer such an issue.

[EDIT] I uploaded a new version of the mock-up to my site. It's now done in a single SVG document and should cause fewer problems.

[SharkD]

Here are two screenshots of what the same images might look like in-game, using two different dithering techniques instead of alpha-transparency.

[SharkD]

Here's what the same images look like without anti-aliasing, and using one of the above dithering methods. This method is most compatible with how GearHead renders its sprites, currently.

[SharkD]

Here's an update to the original set of images, showing more models as well as an additional explosion effect.

[SharkD]

I just tested the images in GearHead, and it doesn't look too pretty. Apparently, GearHead reduces terrain sprites to 8 bits, as well.

[Anticheese]

Hmm, would there be some way to patch up GH to support 16-bit graphics?

[SharkD]

Maybe. We'll see.

[Joseph Hewitt]

GearHead does not reduce terrain sprites to 8 bit; it does convert them to 16 bits, which is the regular color depth.

[SharkD]

Oops! I noticed some color reduction going on. Didn't realize it was 16 bits, though.

[EDIT] Well, here is is again--except this time in its full, 24-bit glory! (It still looks crappy )