New guest attack sprites.

[MrTroodon]

Well a bit ago I attempted to give my Jurassic Park trex custom guest attack sprites, although had to stop due issues with the color palette not working. Just asking if anyone may have an idea of what to do or messed with these sprites previously.

Will be using the dirt cloud meanwhile but certainly would be nice to be able to use custom sprites for these.

[Goosifer]

Using index mode on GIMP might solve it. Here's a tutorial I wrote:

https://docs.zooberry.org/zt1/tool-guides/gimp-batch-processing/

[MrTroodon]

Oh pretty sure already tried converting these sprites with indexed png and using zoot to convert the sprites.

[Goosifer]

Oh hmm. It might be a Blender rendering problem then. The frames might be rendering small alpha artifacts you might need to get rid of. I have a composite node setup to deal with that problem, but mind you I use Blender 3.6. If you're using Hendrix's scripts you might want to visit his thread where I think someone recently brought up a similar question and he offered his own potential solution.

 

Anyway, the nodes:

 

 

If it's too small, the important nodes that fix the problem are:

 

• Render Layers connected to an Alpha Convert node. Change the setting to "To Premultiplied"
• Connect Alpha Convert to the top input of a Math node. Change the Math node setting to "Greater Than" and change threshold to 0.100. You can play with this value to change how harsh the effect is.
• Connect the Math node to the Image input of a Viewer node.
• Connect the same Math node output into another Alpha Convert node but this time change the setting to "To Straight".
• Finally, connect the second Alpha Convert node to the Composite Node's Alpha input.
   

That goes without saying but make sure the Render Layers node's Image output is connected to the Composite node's image input. Also you can ignore the top row nodes...those I use for post-processing and that's completely optional (not that you can read them anyway lol).

 

This might solve your problem, but it could also be something totally different. If this works, then you can run it through index mode again for the last step. The only downside is it renders a very thin line where it replaces the alphas with solids, but I mainly make objects so I haven't seen how it would look on an animal.

 

Here's a closer look at what ends up happening.

 

Without these nodes (notice the alpha artifacts on the edges):

 

 

With the nodes to fix the problem (alphas are replaced with solid blacks):

 

 

Hope this helps.

[Fern]

From Jay: Animations involving animals catching guests is not part of the animal's configuration. It is part of the guest's configuration. That means any new one would be a guest hack. The color palette for guests is complicated because it also has to take into account a guest's shirt color, hair color, etc.. So the guest's color palette has to be exactly the same as ZT's. including order. Zoot, APExp, and APE do not maintain the color palette order. Supposedly ZT Studio does, but that does not work on my computer, which is old. So I could not say how. In any event, though, I feel it is not worth doing a new guest attack animation because a properly running zoo should not have guest attacks. By default, the guest attack animation used for new animals is ZT's lion attacking guest. But the Combined Guest Hack For ZT Community changes that default to the fight cloud animation:

http://www.ztcdd.org/DD/index.php?topic=11622.0

If the animation is done, instead of being used when the animal attacks a guest, it could be used as a separate animated statue.

 

Side note from me: There can only be one guest hack ingame and past single versions have been known to cause conflict problems.

And a scenery version would be okay. I released all the ingame ones as animated scenery statues ages

[Goosifer]

Ah yeah likely a palette issue then. I remember Serpy mentioning Frankensteining the guest sprite animations with your Trex animations. I wonder if you can discretely combine them in a way where your guest sprite inside of the Trex animation is generic and shadowy enough so you wouldn't have to worry about the distinct guest color combinations, instead just the flow of the animation to make it look like it happened.

 

It would be tough though. I don't know how much of the guest sprite disappears into the animal sprite and how consistent the location where the guest 'enters' would be. If it's consistent, I think it's 100% doable. (and would be sick if you did!)

[MrTroodon]

9 hours ago, Fern said:

From Jay: Animations involving animals catching guests is not part of the animal's configuration. It is part of the guest's configuration. That means any new one would be a guest hack. The color palette for guests is complicated because it also has to take into account a guest's shirt color, hair color, etc.. So the guest's color palette has to be exactly the same as ZT's. including order. Zoot, APExp, and APE do not maintain the color palette order. Supposedly ZT Studio does, but that does not work on my computer, which is old. So I could not say how. In any event, though, I feel it is not worth doing a new guest attack animation because a properly running zoo should not have guest attacks. By default, the guest attack animation used for new animals is ZT's lion attacking guest. But the Combined Guest Hack For ZT Community changes that default to the fight cloud animation:

http://www.ztcdd.org/DD/index.php?topic=11622.0

If the animation is done, instead of being used when the animal attacks a guest, it could be used as a separate animated statue.

 

Side note from me: There can only be one guest hack ingame and past single versions have been known to cause conflict problems.

And a scenery version would be okay. I released all the ingame ones as animated scenery statues ages

Ehhh wouldnt fun to have it as simply scenary, but yeah I had the feeling that one had to keep the order of the colors in the palette for it to work, since I noticed that was consistent across all of the palettes. Gonna need to check if ZT Studio can really keep the order and if so how, but oh well...

[MrTroodon]

Well found a way to create the color palette while keeping the guest colors in order, you see after the first pixel is the next 189 colors that belong to the animal in the attack palettes. Now the issue is actualy creating the sprites, but cant remember what id did last time. The problem is the blender addon will create a pal named after the "man" folder rather than the "trexm" one on this instance, wich well, is not ideal, now I would guess that one could simply make a new directory for it and have the guest.ai use that instead, the problem is that when I do ingame the trex simply stays in place for like a second and never performs the animation.

[Fern]

If your animal can use the existing graphics that are in the game already then you would just have to fit the animal round that and link to them possibly

[MrTroodon]

Oh sadly I dont have those older files, honestly not sure how I got it to load last time. But yeah in theory the palette issue should be fixed, I just have no idea how to get the new custom directory to work.