Folks, This is sort of a weird one, based on the blocks in the pic that I posted within this message thread -> http://www.tetrisconcept.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=567 . The tetrominoes are a bit strange, but quite cool and pretty looking nonetheless - P.S. Also includes the Tracker tune "Second Reality PM.s3m" (aka "UnreaL ][ / PM", original filename "2ND_PM.S3M"). This tune was Purple Motion's (Jonne Valtonen of Future Crew) music contribution to Future Crew's award winning Assembly '93 demo, "Second Reality" - Standard linkage follows (note that the URLs are case-sensitive): Readme -> http://tang.cmoo.com/~snor/weeds/Weeds_ ... n_Skin.txt LockJaw in-game screenie -> http://tang.cmoo.com/~snor/weeds/Weeds_ ... n_Skin.jpg Yer ZIP -> http://tang.cmoo.com/~snor/weeds/Weeds_ ... n_Skin.zip
Made a slight update to the skin, edited the transparency for the shadow blocks for better visibility. If you downloaded the skin anytime on 6/6/07, snag the ZIP again from the above links - P.S. In-game screenie is the same, I was too lazy to create another <G>.
Very interesting skin. I'm still scratching my head on how it works. For the field background, I'd suggest putting a layer of opaque black to give contrast to the tetrominos, especially the I.
You too, huh <LOL>? Same here, it's really a strange (although pretty) effect <G>. I tired darkening the bacground's gradient somewhat (same thing as adding a layer of black, and then adjusting it's transparency extremely low before merging the layers for the final BMP), but it lost all of it's "glowing" neon effect to it. BTW, do you play LJ in windowed or fullscreen mode? On my monitor it looks fairly OK (I run LJ in fullscreen mode, and my regular desktop rez is 800x600 - IOW, all of the screenies that I release for my skins look just like I'm playing LJ, on my PC). BTW, did you notice the shadows? Hehe, pretty cool looking <IMHO> with that transparency (note that you have to set LJ's shadow option for either "Faint color" or "Fainter color" - regular "Color" messes up the transparent effect).
I meant darkening only the well area. The skin really suits its name though since it's so bright on the eyes. I play LJ in windowed mode but it looks just like your screenshot. The shadows are awesome. I'm gonna have to try experimenting with transparency.
Tepples, maybe a better way to set up the connected bmp would be to draw all orientations for all tetrominoes separately.
But then there's the problem of tetrominoes no longer being whole when parts of them get cleared in a line... The "safest" way, I guess, would be to cover all possible combinations of connections to any given block. (This would also probably make a major skin format change unnecessary if a future version of LJ ever allows users to play with custom shapes, instead of the 10 built in there now.) But then the skins would be much bigger than they are now, since there are 16 different possible combos of up/down/left/right connections to a block. 47, if you also take diagonals into account (allowing, for example, O's without holes in the middle, like in Rich's screenshot). ...I actually had started working last night on an example of how big this might look. Left to right: already in well, currently falling piece, shadow. Top to bottom: I, J, L, O, S, T, Z, I3, L3, I2, garbage, that weird special block (didn't finish it yet), silver square, gold square. But the size...oh god. I had put this image together because I was curious how much space it would take up, and my ugly suspicions were confirmed. This 576-by-2016-pixel monstrosity is only 21 kilobytes 'cause it's a PNG that only uses 39 unique colors...a BMP version would be 3.6 megs.
The current ljconn image attempts to do that. The only issue is with inside corners. The work around is to split each block into 4 quadrants, and then pull the correct image for each quadrant. The O without donut is done manually (see below). I did work out a way of how to do the gradient effect without getting a disjointed look. The gradient effect in the middle doesn't quite look right, but it's very close, and hardly noticeable after a while. Also note that the border is a placeholder. I had intended to try to copy the border from Rich's blocks, but I gave up on that idea. That's the bomb block. Generally, the large bomb image only appears as a 2x2 piece. I like the look of that skin, and wouldn't mind seeing more of it. I especially like the different colours for the minor pieces (which are currently coded to be standard colours so that skins would stay backwards compatible). The quadranting technique would help reduce the size, I think. It does remove some possibilities, but it still leaves a lot of room open. The biggest issue is the "donut O block". The blue neon skin file currently just puts the gradient straight over the middle section, removing the inside corner detail (zoom in on the preview image and you'll see what I mean. Lockjaw's default skin has the inside corners for all pieces, which gives the donut O block. You can paint over the hole, so that id doesn't appear, but then the inside corner appears broken. My proposal is to include a seperate image (24x24, assuming default sizes) just for a filled in middle, so that both styles are accessable as necessary. I also propose having a single image containing multiple block colours, and then have the program pick out each colour as it wants to use it. Assuming that you only want one set of connected pieces, you could probably fit each colour in 288x24, with space left over for other things. With all 3 connection images, 576x24 should easily do it...
Something that would be cool is if LJ supported transparency for the actual blocks themselves... lot's of neat effects could be achieved like this - Hehe, I actually stumbled upon the transparency support within the shadow blocks accidently... I had used RGB: 255/0/255 within one of the shadow block images in one of the skins that I was working on, and was surprised to find that it was transparent in that portion <G>. Ended up having to change the color to 255/5/255 so's that the color would display properly (no biggie though, as it looks so close to the original 255/0/255 color).
But it ZIPs down quite nicely - Converted to an optimized 256 color palette, the resulting BMP was 1.2 megs; zipped size was only 12kb. Left as a 24-bit image, the resulting BMP was almost 3.5 megs, but zipped only 24kb - 'Course the BMP would still take the same amount of hard drive space reguardless of color depths (1.2 or 3.5 megs), but the zipped download would be of manageble size -
OH, right...I remember a while back thinking it was neat that this could be done with NES tiles, because the water on the map screens in SMB3 is drawn with that same technique (NES gfx tiles are 8x8, but most objects in games are at least 16x16). Now why didn't I think of that when I was messing with these blocks... Ah well. REDUCT-O-MATIC GOOOOOO: ...heh, this actually fits on one screen now.
