LittleBear
says: It's not like it's rocket surgery or brain science.
17.02.08
Pixel Robots Editor
Pixel Robots inspired happymonster to create a cool little sprite editor. It puts a nice package around taking little bits and pieces from any of the automatically generated robots (or Spaceships). Could use the ability to add colour schemes, and maybe my suggested animation trick (iterate each byte of the integer over a small range). Though I guess with this editor you lose the original seed value in your robot “mash-up”. Thanks to Oddbob for the link.
Richard said,
February 17, 2008 at 1:01 pm
I see Bob’s been keeping everyone updated!
It’s still a very early prototype, not really a full editor yet. But it can create some nice monsters, faces, ships and others.
Can you describe your animation trick in more detail? I’m not quite getting it yet..
the2bears said,
February 17, 2008 at 1:18 pm
Hi Richard,
Yeah, the Bob who is Odd sent me an email about your project. It’s pretty cool, and interesting, as I’ve been a fan of both the Pixel Robots and Spaceships for awhile.
The animation is fairly simple, in that the difference in ship generated by an integer n, with n+1 and n+2 is rather small. However, this only affects the “lower” area of the ship. So, instead of n+1 I’ve been fiddling with n + 0×01010101, which creates a subtle change in the generated ship in 4 areas (roughly top to bottom). It works as animation because I render the ships “on the fly”, based on the seed. I add the delta, then again, then back down to the original seed.
Bill
Richard said,
February 17, 2008 at 1:42 pm
Ah ok..
I’m not sure that would work in this case as there aren’t any seeds so to speak of. It’s just randomised each time a new image is generated.
I think animation in this case (especially since the sprites can be anything) would have to be guided manually, and that’s a whole new set of massive problems!
the2bears said,
February 17, 2008 at 1:57 pm
That’s what I thought, the loss of the seed makes it a manual task. And yes, writing an editor allowing animation would be a fairly big task
Bill
failrate said,
February 17, 2008 at 3:33 pm
I recently wrote a vector shmup game enemy sprite generator based on the same project as this one, an d what I did for my editor was use the inverse of the function to reencode it to a byte. That is, I had a simple shift function that converted an integer to a vectory space ship sprite on a NxN canvas. Each byte corresponded to a position (generally, somewhere between 0 and N/2), and that position was mirrored on the y-axis.
Then, when I had a decent starting point, I would use my mouse to tweak the image by moving the corners of the drawing towards and away from the center axis. By using the inverse of the shift function, this would convert all of the edges in the picture *back* into an integer, so I could then save the adjusted value for my game data.
So, while I was working on this, I realized I was only using 4-bit words. If I wanted to, I could use full bytes or double-bytes, etc. and do multi-layered vector effects, or vector shading. Or, what you might want to try in this case is save the seed value and a generated offset from the seed value (still just one more integer, probably). That might make it easier to implement Bill’s animation suggestion (Which I think I may try now).
failrate said,
February 17, 2008 at 9:09 pm
oops, I meant “nibble”, not “word”
failrate said,
February 17, 2008 at 11:53 pm
And, done. I rewrote a version of my old space ship generator in Flash. It’s missing the tweaking feature, but pretty good for a few hours’ work, and an easy hack for someone else to get working. I posted it on my blog (link in my name, innit).
failrate said,
February 19, 2008 at 11:55 pm
Updated version with tweaking: http://failrate.com/b/ProcVecEd.html
It has a bug with the tweaking feature. I think I made a mistake in my bit-shifts in drawVertex function, but it’s late right now. Another update later.
the2bears.com » Sprite Generators Revisited said,
February 21, 2008 at 7:58 pm
[...] up on the recent sprite creation tool by happymonster there are a couple more applications to play with. I love the kind of procedural [...]