Improved Icons

[Dazz]

Alright, since we've decided on how to deal with organisation of this, if you're interested in getting involved in helping out with everything, please PM me your email address associated with your Google account.

We are going to use Google Drive to organise everything.

If you only want to do a few things every now and then, remember to name the icons after the ID number, save in .png format, and then zip them up and send them my way.

[Jermungandr]

Icon makers are no longer required with this system; a way of making images transparent may be of use though.

Now when you say making images transparent, do you mean making a solid background color invisible, like with this old cheap thing I made forever ago, or do you mean like creating a PNG image with 50% transparency with an invisible backdrop. I'm not a hundred percent sure the latter is possible with PHP image propagation, from what little I've looked into it so far. I'm already looking into it though.

[Petie]

You can control the alpha layer via PHP actually. It's just less than intuitive but something I need to get working for another project anyway so I'll let you know if/when that happens.

As for what Dazz means, I can't be sure but I imagine he wants some way of batch processing away the icon part of our existing images which is definitely easier said than done.

[Jermungandr]

Actually THAT is very easy in comparison. All you have to do is have it crop away the frame and then remove the common specific colors associated with the backdrop. As long as the sprite itself does not share any of shades of red used in the background (which would be very rare) you'd be left with the sprite alone on top of a transparent backdrop.

However this would leave you with very tiny preview sprites in comparison to the larger size that the new icon expects.

[Petie]

Right, and given the fact that we have almost 56,000 sheets, I'd be willing to bed that we'd wind up with some overlap with at least some of the sprites in that automated color removal. Regardless, I don't think the plan is for that to be permanent though - just a temporary interim step as we prepare the new icons.

[TheShyGuy]

hmm I don't really check out the resource often anymore, but after a quick skim, it looks like everything is the same size? All game icons are the same size, all items are the same. Sorry if this is very obvious, but I'm not a submitter so I'm a bit clueless about it. Couldn't you just batch crop out the icon? Sorry if that's a stupid question.

-edit:
nvm DrShnaps said it above and got a program below. Nice.

[Jermungandr]

Actually THAT is very easy in comparison. All you have to do is have it crop away the frame and then remove the common specific colors associated with the backdrop. As long as the sprite itself does not share any of shades of red used in the background (which would be very rare) you'd be left with the sprite alone on top of a transparent backdrop.

And here you go, just like I said:

http://www.jermungandr.net/experiments/t...strans.rar

How to use:
- Dump all icons to be converted into the "original" folder.
- Run (view) the index.php file.
- Pull the extracted images from the "modify" folder.

The new files save with the same filenames you started with. In fact you can even dump whole folders of icons in the "original" file and it will save with the same folders in the modify folder.

Example of it in action:

http://www.jermungandr.net/experiments/tsr-masstrans/

Hopefully this is what you meant or I just wasted a ton of my time.

[Dazz]

I'm sorry to say DSP, this is... Almost pointless...

With the increased size, these will mostly come out as weird little boxes inside the bigger sprite area.

I literally meant a means of removing a coloured background from a sprite... Like removing the magenta background. Something I'm fairly certain you already have.

With what you've got here, the outcome is this:



The first link you posted for the background is almost the right thing I was aiming for, but setting limitations to it;
checkbox to trim all empty pixels surrounding the outcome sprite
if out larger than the maximum accepted size, fail.
batch processable.

[Dazz]

Revised the Game icon size. 250px is too big for retro consoles. 240px makes way more sense, and doesn't exactly detract that much.

Oh, and while I remember; an added benefit of game icons being handled in this way is that we can use the same image for games across the sites. If there's a Suikoden 2 section on the Sounds Resource, for example.

[Petie]

Wasn't your original plan to keep the same size and just add the database driven names as a temporary solution until we have new images at the new size. If you still intended to do that, this would definitely prove useful.

[Dazz]

If people agree to that; I believe the staff decided that, for sheet icons, this wasn't a good option, as to make the text display properly, it would have to look really weird for a while.

[Petie]

Right, I was among those who didn't like the look but assumed we were going ahead with it temporarily. I'm totally for not doing it, though unfortunately, that means a fair amount if time was mostly wasted. Sorry about that!

I did say mostly though. Admittedly, I haven't looked into this recently and could likely figure it out if I just sit down and try it but since you've already done the work, can you send me at least the part of the code that let's you save images with a transparent background? I'm sure I'm just missing one line somewhere but so far, mine just come out black where they should be transparent. Thanks!

[Ton]

I was saying the games would be a bigger pain because we'll have to go through and get brand new screenshots for each one, rather than just snatching a sprite and slapping it on the icon.

[Dazz]

That's true, but there's far less of them to make.

[Jermungandr]

I'm sorry to say DSP, this is... Almost pointless...

With the increased size, these will mostly come out as weird little boxes inside the bigger sprite area.

Well yeah, that was my point when I said

However this would leave you with very tiny preview sprites in comparison to the larger size that the new icon expects.

Petie seemed to be suggesting that this would be a temporary solution though, something to serve as a placeholders while you were working on getting the REAL new preview images created, which is why I went ahead and went through with it.

I can, if you want, easily tweak the code to double the size of the cropped images.