The Mugen Fighters Guild - Trient Forest Re-Release and New Stages by Signus Hikaru

Dj_Bereta said, February 08, 2008, 12:11:09 am

Looks good all stages.

You cannot be serious.

To be blunt, all the stages are awful.

1) They all have asymmetry problems. Boundleft should be the negative value of boundright.

2) Two of them are single image, single layer stages. With very few exceptions, stages of these types do not turn out well. These stages are clearly not the exceptions.

3) They all suffer from heavy color loss. There's a couple methods I'm aware of (besides using multiple layers for each individual object):

a) I don't think there's an official name for this (jigsaw method?), but it's the most common one used. Basically, you'll have to split large images down into smaller parts, color reduce each part to 256 colors, and then reassemble the image in the def file (just like a puzzle). Each part doesn't have to be symmetrical (large pieces for less colorful parts, smaller pieces for more colorful parts), but most people prefer symmetrical parts.

My most recent stage used a fairly colorful sky background. It's split up into 250 pieces, each 64x64 resolution, and each tile was color reduced using photoshop (best color reducer, imo) to 256 colors. To absolutely avoid color loss, you would need 16x16 tiles (256 pixels max), but almost no one does that. There are programs available which automatically split up images into small parts, but of course, none provide mugen start coordinates. Maybe someone should program that...

b) Dither method. Sometimes, regardless of what's done, mugen will still auto reduce colors on its own giving less than satisfactory results (display output is locked to 16-bit color, I believe). This is most notable when trying gradients. For those, I take a screenshot, see what colors mugen allows for the gradient, and then make a dither using only those colors. I try to avoid dither whenever possible, otherwise.

c) Transparency method. You'll start off with 1 image and end up with 3 (well, 4 including blank black background layer). Basically, you split the image into its individual color channels: red, green, blue. Many programs can do this, but can't seem to set the other two channels to 0, however. In order for this to work, the other two channels have to be set to 0 and not any other value.

After the images are split into channels, you should have 3 images: each one having shades of one primary color. If not, then the other channels are not set to 0. Color reduce each part to 256 colors (there should be no color loss when doing this, since each channel only allows 256 values). Then over a blank black background, overlap all 3 images using the same start coordinates and use trans = add. This will perform a simple layer addition and produce the original image. This should have no color loss. I don't recommend this for most cases since it causes a rather significant performance hit for large images.

Another variation with less of a performance hit is to use one of the channel layers without transparency and use trans = add on the other two on top of it.

As a side note, this cannot be used to fix gradients; mugen will still auto reduce the final image on its own.

4) The forest stage, besides the color loss, has an unacceptable level of blur. It is painful just looking at it. Extremely poor judgment in image selection.

5) Terreno Baldio is the worst looking of the bunch; the poor animation and color loss contributes to this. Do not directly convert a jpeg image for use in mugen. The compression artifact alone looks terrible. Either find a non-jpeg image or find a large jpeg image, clean it up, and shrink it down before use to get rid of compression artifact.

To summarize, they all need to be redone from scratch.

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Trient Forest Re-Release and New Stages by Signus Hikaru (Read 2815 times)

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