What are 'Lazily-made' graphics? (How to use Masks correctly)

[Wohlstand]

Lazily-made / Noob-made / noob drawing / result of lazy effort - These are pairs of a image and mask, created via simple copies of the original image, with a white color.

What is a mask?
A mask is an Alpha-channel coding image. Each Pixel of the mask defining the level of opacity of the same pixel on the source image:
Each Pixel of a mask - is a value of opacity for each pixel of the source image:


And the result of using a wrong mask is a glitch.

Here are some examples:

Examples of VALID sprite pairs:
+=>

+=>

Examples of INVALID (Lazily-made) sprite pairs, this will create appearances of render errors:
+=>

+=>

+=>

[Mikepjr]

The fact that this even uses masks drives me up the wall.
It becomes rather frustrating after awhile.
Especially since every graphic get's done separately rather than part of a tile set of sorts or something.

[Kevsoft]

I know that this is dumb. SMBX was made with VB6 (already like 16 years old) and I doubt that there was transparenty support, so the developers had to use masks.

[Mikepjr]

True, but that is SMBX though, and i would hope this software would improve on such things.
I mean, i know how to use masks, it's just a pain..
But that's why i suggested a tile set in another thread for some things.
It would make it at least some what easier to manage.

[Kevsoft]

Yes, in the new engine there will be better support, like PNG with alpha-channel.

But, as this engine is also SMBX compatible, I wanna provide a tool which automatically makes a mask out of a graphics sprite. So it then can be used for SMBX.

[Wohlstand]

Oh, I forgot say about planned npc-*.txt params:
imgfile=xxx.png - for set image file
usemask=0 - disable using of masks, will be used internal PNG's transparency, or if value usemask=1, will be opened file "xxxm.png" and applyed to source image as alpha-channel mask.
same flag "usemask" will me implemented in global INI file, for use them globally (planned for "SMBX Extended", what will be use PNG graphics instead masked GIFs).
This parameters only planned and will be implemented only with engine part.

[Mikepjr]

Awesome news then.
But eventually you have to say goodbye to worrying about compatibility to SMBX and just make something better all on it's own.

[Wohlstand]

Awesome news then.
But eventually you have to say goodbye to worrying about compatibility to SMBX and just make something better all on it's own.

Yep, as you're already aware, compatibility is necessary for transferring the old episodes into the new format and for playing old archived episodes. But new features are going to be supported in the full mode without limits :wink:

I've already created a tool for creating transparent PNGs from masked GIFs:
https://github.com/Wohlhabend-Networks/PlatGEnWohl/tree/master/GIFs2PNG
This will be a helpful tool for speedily converting all custom graphics in the PNG format. I plan to add improvements to them, such as 'walk in subdirectories' for converting all graphics of a episode. And for lazily-made graphics, I have an idea for Pixel-By-Pixel converting into the correct mask with a comparison to the source image. And if this experiment is successful, I plan to create a tool for fixing all lazily-made graphics without GIMP or Paint.NET

Over here I've placed SMBX's converted packs:
http://wohlsoft.ru/docs/_Important/