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Harlan
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Berkeley, CA, USA
Aug 2005
time: 21:13
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DOGFISH told me today that Paul told him the size of sprites is unlimited. I found that hard to believe, so I had to try it out for myself. Sure enough, its true! The sprites that come with the game are all 96 pixels by 72 pixels. But as long as you keep that ratio, you can make them bigger. I tried making a unit that was 128 by 96. Actually the unit art fit into the usual confines, but I wanted to have the shadow extend farther down so this air unit (a Flying Fortress) would look like it was higher up in the sky. It works! I did a little testing, and I gather that the maximum size of a sprite would be big enough to include all the tiles around it as well (at the least). One has to be careful to fix the "hot spots" in the text file that goes into the sprite, or the graphic will in fact look like its standing on the tile next to where it should be. I simply increased them the same percentage as the other numbers and it centered fine.
So what does this mean? The underlying tile sizes are still the same, so one can't really go overboard with this, or it won't be clear what unit is on what tile. But it does open up possibilities. One could go up pretty far without too much confusion. There could be high flying planes and low flying ones for instance. Or a super giant ogre unit that stands several times taller than all others. Or one could make a city architectural style that actually spreads out into neighboring squares like suburbs (though this might be a problem if ocean squares are near by).
Good scoop by Paul... very interesting. A good example of how wonderfully editable CTP is, and yet how poorly documented it is too.
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27-07-1999 16:09
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