g-force platinum foreground sprite

[andy55]

The former

Heh... Fair enough, but let it be noted that the opposition vote has the numbers in a major way.

Andy

[Woody]

What kenh said.

[chkman]

All y'd need do is make G-Force read the (default).txt for each folder. I tried putting one in Sprites/Foreground and it simply used the one in Sprites.

I recently tried changing the default in Sprites to make everything foreground thinking that the ones called from scripts would be background coz I was using the flags for fit to screen etc. But since some didn't fill the screen in the X or Y dim. they were floating about.

Honestly, to answer your question, bring back the lost feature (foreground folder) before adding anything new. I'm very tempted to go back to 3.0

And how about sorting thru all those waves and putting particles in Waveshapes/particles, please, oh, please, please.

[Woody]

Andy said:

Would you rather have me spending my time putting in and maintaining foreground sprites

How hard could that be? You had the folder for us once and you are the man. No matter what you do G-force is great and I love it. Of course, I don't get anything else done on the computer anymore. LOL

[herls]

I used the auto foreground pretty extensively, it was quite easy to use, when having a party, I would take pictures with my digital camera, then the link program would automatically download them to the foregrounds folder, CTL-U and the new pics would be displayed all over my house. What is the easiest way to auto foreground something now, I read the posts here, but don't quite get it...

Can I create a sub folder with a default.txt that makes everything dropped into it, do the auto foreground routine we saw previously?

[chkman]

You can alter (default).txt in the sprites folder by adding "Pen=1" and that will make all pictures (without their own .txt file) be foreground sprites. So adding pictures to the sprites folder or any sub-folder will make them 'foreground' sprites.

If you want them to move you can change the X= and Y= lines in (default).txt. You might want to change the "Flag" value as well.

[djpeterhenry]

hi there.
does anybody nows, how i can create a sprite being foreground in g-force platinum?

i used g-force gold before and there was a special foreground and a backround folder. but i can´t find it in the platinum version.

sorry for my bad english - hope you can understand.
thanks paddy

Whatever happened to Auto and Foreground sprites ?

Technically, the was no removal of functionality. What was removed was the special folder layout that that allowed for easy specification of foreground sprites (previously, one could drop an image file into the "auto foreground" sprites folder and it'd appear as a foreground sprite). Ultimately, I removed the old folder layout scheme in order to make using sprites more user-friendly (think about the learning curve of the previous versions where there were each of the three folders had special behavior). A related factor to my decision was that in my estimation only the smallest percent of users were using the foreground sprites folder. And to any users who were using it, I can only offer my apologies.

In any case, to make a sprite a "foreground" particle, 'Pen' needs to be defined. Once it is, G-Force will draw with the intensity specified with 'Pen' (and will erase it with an intensity of 'EPen').

In other words, suppose you have an image named "boat.jpg", and you want to make it appear as a foreground particle. Create a new text file, "boat.txt" and in it, put the following:

Code: Select all

X="0" 
Y="0" 

EPen="FADER * dt ^ 1.5" 
Pen="FADER"

// flags--See (Default).txt for a list 
Flag="1 + 4 + 8 + 4096"

// The duration (in seconds) of the sprite 
PDur="20 + rnd( 50 )" 

Vers=310 

You can experiment with different flags in 'Flag' by looking at the flags in the file "(Default).txt" You can also experiment with EPen and Pen for different pen drawing intensities (FADER is a convenience function that goes from 0 to 1 to 0 over the course of the particle's lifetime).

Again, in a perfect world, I would have liked to keep the auto foreground sprites folder scheme, but it was just too much for basic users to deal with.

Andy

Perhaps a recursive loading of (Default).txt from the current folder on down would allow users to specify any number of distinct defaults. For example, users could recreate the foreground and background behavior.