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Is there a way to flash an object with a solid color, instead of turning invisible and visible again? For example, if a character or enemy gets hit, i want it to temporary flash white, and revert back to normal. Can i achieve this without resorting to using color replace feature?
Perhaps you could use a Shader that messes with the RGB coefficient on and off?
The best way is almost invariably a hardcoded animation. A HWA shader *can* do it, but its needlessly expensive in terms of GPU. If you had a bunch of other effects going on at the same time, like a ton of enemies being struck and flashing, it could slow down a game based on shaders alone.
There are four ways of doing this that I can think of. Each with different pros and cons.
1) The "Simple Mask" shader does exactly what you're asking for, but as Pixelthief noted it's GPU-expensive, and requires HWA.
I use the shader-method myself. Partly because I'm lazy, but also because you can have the colour fade back to the regular colours if you want. If you use HWA and you are only using this effect for a few objects it really is the simplest solution.
2) You can change one specific colour on your active object in the event-editor. If you create an even where you specify all the different exact colours in your active object and change them to a different colour that would do the trick. But this is only viable if you have a very small colour pallette on your active object, and even then it is time-intensive.
3) You can create a single animation where the object flashes in your selected colour. This would only work well if your objects animation is static or nearly static, though. If your object is animated through events this would be the way to go.
4) You can create a different complete animation for every animation the object has, identical in every way sans colour. Then you could specify the animation and frame in the event editor. Example:
---------------------------------------------------------------
"Bullet" overlaps "Hero"
+ Animation (dancing) is playing
= Set alterable value A("Hero") to Current animation frame("Hero"), Change Animation of Hero to (Dancing red), Change animation Frame (Hero) to alterable value A("Hero")
---------------------------------------------------------------
Doubling the amount of animations would of course increase the size of your game though, and I really have no idea how expensive this would be in terms of GPU.
N64Mario. I am not sure if it is what is needed in your case, but I have an example on my website that may help.
Marv
I need a search function on your site, there's too many examples for me to look through them all to see what, or where you're going at. At least maybe a name would help? :-/Quote:
Originally Posted by nivram
IMO,.the simplest way would be to create an additional animation for that.
Kickback and Flash Example
Maybe you will have time to look at it.
I agree with John though.
Could you not just have a duplicated character, and always have it's position on top of the character, doing the same animations, etc, and only have them visible when struck (or what have you). Just have every frame of the char just set to the colour you want.
That only flashes them turning them invisible and visible again. :-/Quote:
Originally Posted by nivram
Though I suppose I can go with double object layer thing just to make it flsh one solid color. I donno I thought there was a way to do this through color shading back before the HWA days.
I *do* wish there were better ways to do this. In Asunder one of the deals is that I not only have enemies flash when you hit them, but go whited-out and leave behind a trail when you rewind them through time. And since it records their animation values, I could easily pull the data for tracing that onto the screen- but the trace objects have to display a hardcoded animation for each object, which limits me. I'm just doing 1-2 whited out animations in one object, for every enemy in the game. If I wanted to capture its full fluid animation properly, it would take a full copy of every animation in the whole game put into a single object, which would not just double the size of the enemies but also take up RAM footprint (enemies are load-on-call).
I'm still researching if there was a better way to do it. Like someone working it into a surface object or something, but I haven't found anything promising.
Screenshot of what i mean by the trails;
http://i.imgur.com/HywOi.png
The problem is, that enemy is a crow that flaps its wings, and has a 4 frame animation. Now for that one, I could go back and hardcode it so it would have 4 different 'trail' animations and use those, but I can't do that for every animation of every enemy in the whole game, and I really wish I could find a better way.
Here's an example using one of Marvs examples..LOL Shoot the chicken and he will flash using an added animation like I had suggested. Please don't use my chicken graphics, Thank you.
One possibility I've thought up is blitting an object to a surface, flood filling it with white, saving that to a file (or memory) and loading it into an animation for the 2nd object, which would cache these images and pull them as needed. But it still seems awfully complicated, slow and with a thousand ways it could go wrong.
AnD4D is right... just duplicate the object and have it mimic the parent. Then make it a "flash" color. It's efficient because it's only on screen during the flash. The other ways described seem needlessly complicated and resource demanding.