Wednesday, August 2, 2006

Eye Candy

Let’s admit it – graphics make or break any simulation or game program. So that means you have to get at least pretty good at creating them. As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t go out and buy the best tools available – I’m just a guy sitting on the sofa creating stuff. A few years ago Paint Shop Pro was a nice little shareware program that you could get for about $40. You can go spend about $500 for the world-renowned Photoshop – but I like being married, as I may have mentioned.

So PSP it was. A few years later PSP went bigtime and started selling boxed product for $99. I’ve paid that price more than once for the latest upgrade – I like this software that well.

Oh, and JASC - creators of PSP - were bought by Corel a while back. You can buy PSP X (there's a version XI now) here for $69 the last time I checked. Its worth 3 times that price. By the way, I don't get a nickel for saying that.

Like any tool, it takes time to get good with it. I bought a few books (surprise) along the way, and I literally feel that I can do anything that I want to do with PSP.

As I mentioned earlier, I chose the simplicity of a scrolling 2D environment for my project. I must admit that I was, and am, a little intimidated by learning 3D graphics. I’ll tackle it one day, but not just yet.

I learned early on that blending my horse images into a background that varied in hues and tones was a big challenge. You see, graphics can only have smooth-looking edges when they blend into the colors behind them. This is how “anti-aliasing” works. So if you have, for instance, a graphic with a black edge, and it’s on a white background, the only way it can have a smooth edge is if the black edge blends into the white background. And the only way that can happen is if the edge of the graphic “blends” by having a set of edge pixels that are dark gray, then another set that are a middle gray, and another set that are a light gray. Then it looks very smooth.

But what happens if you put that black graphic on a brown background? No really – what happens?

OK, you have 3 rings of dark/medium/light gray pixels around the black graphic – on top of brown. Doesn’t look smooth at all – in fact it stands out terribly. It took me quite a while to figure this out and solve for it – by doing my blending with a background color that was similar to the background in the simulation. Thought I’d pass that tidbit on to you so you don’t struggle as much as I did.

By the way, to be as realistic as possible, I actually visited a world-renowned race track that’ll remain nameless, and took dozens of photos that I later used in the background of my simulation.

I ended up creating 300 different horses, 15 jockeys, and 3 layers of 2D scrolling in the background. The end result wasn’t 3D, but it was darn good – and all done with a $40 graphics tool.

Next we’ll talk about how to protect your intellectual property.

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