Topic: Umihara Kawase [COMPLETE]

[Raccoon Sam]

Animated maps of all 50 levels will be posted in this thread. I aim to post one map per day.

- 00



Comments are welcome

[Maxim]

JonLeung should give you the link/pic tags.



The animation is way too fast in Firefox 3.5.1. In IE6 and Windows Picture and Fax Viewer it's OK, but the waterline flashes too slowly. It'd be better to do 50% transparency for that.



Why no background?

[Raccoon Sam]

Thanks Maxim.

-Animation frames have been set to 0,02 seconds, which represents one frame of the SNES NTSC 60fps standard. If the GIF is rendered correctly, you should see it almost exactly as you would in the game.

-50% transparency would work only in a PNG, which does not support animation. I wanted to keep the conveyor belts animated, which is why I resorted to GIFs. (I had another idea of having two images on top of eachother; a GIF for the conveyors and a PNG for the main map, but I am not sure if that is allowed.

-Background is not included because it serves only an aesthetic purpose, but is also only a 256x224 image that always moves with the screen; play the game to see what I mean.



Thanks for the input though.

[snesmaster]

If you have Flash, and now how to use it, that would make the maps look great in whatever browser people used, and you could do the transparencies.  You could also do layers in Flash.

[Raccoon Sam]

That's a good point, but as far as I'm aware, Flash is not available to Linux users. I want the maps to be available to everyone.

[Revned]

Linux people can use Flash, just not as well as others. I personally dislike it because it eats ~80% of my cpu just watching YouTube.

[Raccoon Sam]

I get almost immediate heatup while viewing Flash movies in full quality as well.

[snesmaster]

I believe that just a simple map done in flash with some simple animations should not take up that much processor power.



You could make one map that way and see how much it uses and have some friends check it out on different operating systems before you decide if you will do the rest of the maps in flash or not.

[Revned]

You also can't download and view the maps offline very easily. I would either stick with GIF or try APNG.

[Raccoon Sam]

Revned's right.

APNG would be the best choice for it supports all the features GIF does + more. It also has practically no color limits and is lossless.

The major kick is that it is not very widely supported. I can't encode APNGs nor read them, so yeah. I'm aware Firefox supports it but not everyone (including me) uses it.

[Maxim]

I saw the background; it is somewhat photographic and blurry, so why not stretch it to fill the map? Or, fill with a solid colour (maybe average the background layer).



The frame rate issue is apparently to do with IE doing weird things (altering the delay to 100ms) and GIF programs compensating for it; Firefox renders at the "true" rate and is thus much faster.

[Raccoon Sam]

I dunno, I always see transparency as the optimal background choice over a solid color, as it can be easily changed by applying a color background to the HTML page itself; conceivability is in the viewer's hands. Technically, the very background image could be set to the background as well with this method.



What I'm really after in my maps, though, is that it has only the things you need to know; where the starting point is, where the enemies are, where the water level is.. things like that which assist you to the optimal route or whatever. A background only pleases one's eyes and might make the viewer oversee crucial, small elements that could blend in.

[Maxim]

The animated GIF is indeed set to 20ms per frame. That's 50 frames per second, so the waterline should flicker 25 times per second. Firefox does this. IE increases all frame times below 50ms up to 100ms, so it "runs" at 1/5 speed, and the waterline flashes 5 times per second. It's just another of the IE non-standards problems.



How many frames does the original game hold each conveyor belt position for?

[snesmaster]

I never heard of APNG before, is it a web standard?  Will all the web browsers display it?  I know formats like .tif are not web standards so not all browsers will display them.

[Maxim]

Only Firefox 3+ and Opera 9.5+.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apng#Application_support



There are no mature tools for making them, and PNG optimisers don't work on them.