NMLTutorial/Road vehicle 32 bit sprites
Now that you've seen that you can add 32 bit sprites, let's do that with an example. In fact we're going to pick up halfway down the road vehicle example from the beginning of this tutorial. We'll continue with what we had at the end of this page.
Example graphics
We'll be adding 32 bit graphics for the normal zoom level, including a recolour mask. From there we'll give you some pointers on how to add sprites for other zoom levels and you can easily fill in the rest yourself. So let's look at the graphics, shall we?
First, let's have a look again at the 8 bit sprites we already have for our road vehicle.
The 32 bit sprites are similar to the 8 bit sprites. The main difference is that to indicate transparancy you must use the real transparency of PNG files. If you use the blue background for transparency in 32 bit sprites, you'll get just that: a blue background. You may also use the alpha channel for semi-transparent pixels.
Note that the sprite background is actually transparent. We've made the borders around the sprites blue, so that we can actually see where the indivual sprites are. This is not mandatory; as it doesn't end up in the game, you could have made it any other colour, even transparent if you like. We'll put this file in the gfx folder with the regular 8 bit sprites and name it Flatbed_truck_1_goods_32.png.
Now even if you use the exact colours from the palette, this won't enable company colours in 32 bit sprites. For this you have to provide an additional 8 bit mask sprite, which does use the exact palette colours. Ingame, this mask is overlayed on top of the regular 32 bit sprites, which will give you a company-coloured vehicle. Note that we've only drawn the company colours!
As we're now drawing in 8 bit again, we also have to use the magic blue to incidate transparent backgrounds! Also this file goes in the gfx directory and we'll name it Flatbed_truck_1_goods_mask.png.
Spritesets
For the regular 8 bit sprites we have two spritesets in our NML code. Let's have a look at those again:
//graphics definition
spriteset(spriteset_flatbed_truck_1_goods_empty, "gfx/flatbed_truck_1_goods.png") {
//left_x, upper_y, width, height, offset_x, offset_y
[ 0, 0, 8, 18, -3, -10]
[ 16, 0, 20, 16, -14, -7]
[ 48, 0, 28, 12, -14, -6]
[ 96, 0, 20, 16, -6, -7]
[ 128, 0, 8, 18, -3, -10]
[ 144, 0, 20, 16, -14, -7]
[ 176, 0, 28, 12, -14, -6]
[ 224, 0, 20, 16, -6, -7]
}
spriteset(spriteset_flatbed_truck_1_goods_full, "gfx/flatbed_truck_1_goods.png") {
//left_x, upper_y, width, height, offset_x, offset_y
[ 260, 0, 8, 18, -3, -10]
[ 276, 0, 20, 16, -14, -7]
[ 308, 0, 28, 12, -14, -6]
[ 356, 0, 20, 16, -6, -7]
[ 388, 0, 8, 18, -3, -10]
[ 404, 0, 20, 16, -14, -7]
[ 436, 0, 28, 12, -14, -6]
[ 484, 0, 20, 16, -6, -7]
}
To define our 32 bit sprites, we have to define an alternative_sprites block to go with each of the spriteset blocks. The identifiers will be the same, we'll indicate that we have normal zoom sprites via and that the sprites are 32 bit via .
NML Tutorial: Road vehicle 32 bit sprites
