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Reply to Re: Dink HD - Good Shadows Patch

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September 16th 2017, 10:08 AM
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redink1
King He/Him United States bloop
A mother ducking wizard 
I respectfully disagree; while I agree that true alpha-channel support would be nice, I think that having the Dink engine convert from checkerbox to alpha shadows directly is better than converting all existing graphics to use alpha shadows for a couple reasons:

1) As currently implemented, this works with all existing D-Mods without needing to change them (which would greatly increase the download size and file size of all graphics).
2) Right now this can be enabled/disabled from the Dink HD options menu, as it may have a performance cost associated with it.

And... actually... with what I learned updating the checkerboard code, I'm pretty sure Dink supports alpha channel already.

[5 Minutes Later]

Yep!

Apparently Photoshop is the issue; it can't write .bmp with alpha channel, but PixelFormer can (https://stackoverflow.com/a/34572996). So you can use Photoshop to create transparent .pngs, and use PixelFormer to convert those to transparent .bmps.

I tried converting the Initiation lantern to alpha channel, and it works (and plays nice with the 'good shadows' too):



I might play around with this more.

It even 'kind-of' works in FreeDink; it has some unintentional flickering issues, where if the size of the lantern sprite is 100%, it is solid black, but if the size of the sprite is something like 105% or 110%, then it is solid black every-other-frame or so (and literally flickers on-and-off).

Doesn't work at all in v1.08.