Flipping(giant, high animated) active objects without shaders(or any better shaders?)

[DinnerSonic]

I'm toying around with my first experiment in HD MMF2 games, mostly for fun for a friend as practice for the future, but I've come across one issue, that'd be left/right sprites. Normally I just copy and paste for left and right frames, flipping in the editor, but when you have HD graphics, this means two copies of a full color animation with alpha.

Right now it doesn't seem to be an issue when modern games can take at least 1/2 GB of memory, but I'm still wary of all those cloned animation frames being loaded into memory like that, they don't seem to unload until you change frames which can be bad if you don't reload the frame between, say, an in-game cutscene, a level and then a screen-sized boss, all loading up with two directions of frames if there's no fix too.

The obvious solution of course is to use a shader to flip it, which I did, "Flip" in the Complex-softwares pack. It worked at first, but I realize that hotspots/alignments seem to be a bit off, the character's sprite noticably jumps about horizontally in some animations. Is there a shader that deals with this properly? If not, I might have to just go and flip sprites anyway and hope it turns out okay.

[happygreenfrog]

I'm toying around with my first experiment in HD MMF2 games, mostly for fun for a friend as practice for the future, but I've come across one issue, that'd be left/right sprites. Normally I just copy and paste for left and right frames, flipping in the editor, but when you have HD graphics, this means two copies of a full color animation with alpha.

Right now it doesn't seem to be an issue when modern games can take at least 1/2 GB of memory, but I'm still wary of all those cloned animation frames being loaded into memory like that, they don't seem to unload until you change frames which can be bad if you don't reload the frame between, say, an in-game cutscene, a level and then a screen-sized boss, all loading up with two directions of frames if there's no fix too.

The obvious solution of course is to use a shader to flip it, which I did, "Flip" in the Complex-softwares pack. It worked at first, but I realize that hotspots/alignments seem to be a bit off, the character's sprite noticably jumps about horizontally in some animations. Is there a shader that deals with this properly? If not, I might have to just go and flip sprites anyway and hope it turns out okay.

Don't use the Complex-softwares shader pack unless you don't mind giving credit to the guy who made it (it's a part of the license). MMF2 comes with a flip shader, try that one.

[DinnerSonic]

Don't use the Complex-softwares shader pack unless you don't mind giving credit to the guy who made it (it's a part of the license). MMF2 comes with a flip shader, try that one.

Thanks for the tip, though it still has the same issue it seems.

[RootKernel]

The shader doesn't deal with hotspots, it takes the whole image and flip it as is, the hotspot will remain the same.

[MuddyMole]

Yeah, like RootKernel says, shaders have no way of getting the hotpot coordinates, unless you pass them as parameters, which would be way more hassle than its worth.
Presumably it would work if all frames were the same size, with the hotspot in the same place on each - though that would meaning having empty space around the actual sprite, instead of cropping it down.