Game Maker's Garage Forum
Game Creation => SilverCreator => Topic started by: Silverwind on June 10, 2010, 11:58:35 AM
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My beautiful new sprites (http://www.gamemakersgarage.com/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi?board=looneybin;action=display;num=1276108706;start=0#10) won't display properly in GM. The colours come out all bland and crap like, so I may have to swap platforms for Elathondréoth. :(
What's the colour range in SC?
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Whoa. :O Can this be true!? Silver coming go Sc!?
I think the colors display perfectly in Sc.
-Gan
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I just tried it in GameMaker. It looks exactly the same to me. GM doesn't do anything to the graphics except display them.
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My beautiful new sprites (http://www.gamemakersgarage.com/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi?board=looneybin;action=display;num=1276108706;start=0#10) won't display properly in GM. The colours come out all bland and crap like, so I may have to swap platforms for Elathondréoth. :(
What's the colour range in SC?
Odd.. Why don't you change the graphic format ?
It might be a problem with QuickTime
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I just tried it in GameMaker. It looks exactly the same to me. GM doesn't do anything to the graphics except display them.
I thought GM was limited to thousands of colors? I could be totally wrong.
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I just tried it in GameMaker. It looks exactly the same to me.
Aha, a glimpse of hope! Here's how it renders for me:
(http://img339.imageshack.us/img339/6405/screenshot20100610at214.png)
To me, the lush vibrance of the trees has become a soggy moss, and the grass looks dry and dehydrated. Maybe it's because I spent most of last night staring at a 500% x 500% blowup of the tree, but the difference is soul crushing. The beauty is drained, drained I say!
How does it display on your end?
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theres a slight shade of difference, i say convert to sc anyway
my god, the window is so tiny
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theres a slight shade of difference, i say convert to sc anyway
my god, the window is so tiny
Don't use PNG. Use an older file format such as PICT that you can be sure GameMaker will work with.
The problem is probably in different interpretations of the same PNG.
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But that's entirely my point, GM's colour spectrum doesn't seem to exceed the quality of pics and gifs, which don't accommodate my palette. I reckon I'll end up settling on the quality decrease this time, as I've come too far with the Roguesoft RPG Engine to see it unused, but my desire for lush greens will likely take me elsewhere for future games.
Hasten thy approach, oh fair 4.0!
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Hasten thy approach, oh fair 4.0!
dont hold your breath!
....lololol the graphic box has hardley any draw distance!
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But that's entirely my point, GM's colour spectrum doesn't seem to exceed the quality of pics and gifs, which don't accommodate my palette. I reckon I'll end up settling on the quality decrease this time, as I've come too far with the Roguesoft RPG Engine to see it unused, but my desire for lush greens will likely take me elsewhere for future games.
Hasten thy approach, oh fair 4.0!
Other idea : convert your PNG to a different colorspace
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I did. Neither RPG nor CMYK worked. :(
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how does it look in sc?
(http://i40.photobucket.com/albums/e202/eqwanoxgames/Picture3-1.png)
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Ah, that's perfect! :D One day Eq, one day...
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So you got it working ?
Good thing.
If this game is ever released, I can only play it if it's in GM format (I have an old OS X !)
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i had 10.3 for a long time and i could barely use the internet, its not compatible with ANYthing
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Well no, I didn't get it working, but one day I might make it in SC... or Fortran.
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So you got it working ?
Good thing.
If this game is ever released, I can only play it if it's in GM format (I have an old OS X !)
How old is your OS X?
In theory, SilverCreator should run on 10.3.9, but it's not supported due to lack of testing machines. Let me know if it works.
You really should have at least 10.4. Any Mac that can run 10.3 can also run 10.4, and it is faster and still has modern browsers such as Safari 4.1 (almost the same as Safari 5 except no extensions).
i had 10.3 for a long time and i could barely use the internet, its not compatible with ANYthing
There's a pretty recent Camino for 10.3... but it's starting to get pretty bad for anyone left on those old versions.
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Silver, are you very familiar with color settings, both for your monitor and for Photoshop? That may be the culprit. I remember having the same problem between Photoshop and GM way back when, and I think getting my color settings right was the issue. If you know that's not the case then nevermind, but otherwise let me know if you want me to get into more detail.
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More detail please. :)
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Alright, well, I'll start with a disclaimer that all I really know about color calibration is the difference between RGB (additive color) and CMYK (subtractive color). Beyond that, all the different color profiles and settings specific to either of those two formats make my head spin, and I generally just have to experiment until I get things the way I want them. So, there's your fair warning both about my expertise (or lack of it) and how confusing this whole process can be for some people. So don't worry if someone more knowledgeable than I comes along and gives you information about this stuff that conflicts with what I'm about to say. They're probably right and I'm just a noob.
Anyway.
Launch System Preferences > Displays > Color.
Here, you should see under "Display Profile:" a name for the color profile your system is using. If you're happy with the way your monitor generally displays color, DON'T MESS WITH THIS (at least not right now) unless you want a headache. Just know that this is here. If you ever need to calibrate your monitor (just because, personal preference) this where you would do it. If you ever need to match your color to another monitor, this is where you could import the color profile for the other monitor. All you need to know RIGHT NOW, though, is that this window exists, and is tied to what we're going to do next.
Launch Photoshop. I use version CS3, just for reference (in case any of these directions don't match up with your version).
Go to Edit > Color Settings.
Under Working Spaces, look at RGB:
This is where you'll experiment the most. The goal here is to set Photoshop's color profile to something everything else on your computer is using. It might currently say something like "Adobe RGB" or "Apple RGB" or "sRGB IEC61966-2.1". These are standard profiles, and while there's nothing wrong with them, they might differ from the color profile your monitor uses. However, if you remember your profile from above, you might notice you already have these set. If my theory is right though, the profile you have set is NOT the same as the profile your monitor is using.
So what are you looking at exactly, and what's happening here? OS X generally uses the profile in System Preferences to intepret what your monitor displays. Photoshop can, however, display a different profile from the system default. I'm sure I could think of why this could be useful, especially in a professional workflow where you deal with a lot of clients who use a lot of different unique color settings, but I can't think of a specific example right now. But this is, as far as I can gather, why it works this way.
If your head hasn't exploded yet, you now have two options: 1.) Change your monitor color in System Preferences to match Photoshop's setting, or 2.) change the Photoshop setting to match your monitor color.
What did I do? I changed Photoshop. The easiest way to do this is to choose, "Monitor RGB - <name of the color profile in System Prefences>".
This, for me, seemed to be the least detrimental route. If you change your monitor color instead, you might open up a file from a year ago and find you hate it. Now that works for me because my monitor color is already a pretty close approximation to sRGB, with only minor differences that come down to personal taste (brightness, contrast, saturation) (you should probably do your own research in picking between sRGB, Adobe RGB, or Apple RGB -- I admit, I don't really know the difference).
Also, the best way to know if your current monitor color isn't retardo-crazy is to look at your art on other people's monitors (not just one, because your neighbor/brother/cousin might have a retardo-crazy color profile of their own). This is probably a worthy exercise for you in particular, Silver, since I think you're involved in desktop publishing (right?). I doubt yours is way off or bad, since your sprites look amazing on my monitor, but still.
In the end of all this, try transferring to GameMaker however it is you normally transfer (import, copy and paste, whatever the options are these days).
See if that fixed the problem.
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Wow, sounds cool! How on earth did you end up experimenting with all these settings in the first place Jad? ;D
The sprites display identically in all apps with the except of Photoshop, so it must be Photoshops's settings. I'm wary of changing them though, since I've been working with them for so long. Perhaps a little experimentation would do no harm however...
And yeah, me and my dad are desktop publishers, but commercial printers only print in CMYK.
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Wow, sounds cool! How on earth did you end up experimenting with all these settings in the first place Jad? ;D
Part wandering around Google, aimlessly, another part wandering color settings, aimlessly, until everything worked. And then trying to backtrack and explain to myself what I did right (so I wouldn't have to do it again).
The sprites display identically in all apps with the except of Photoshop, so it must be Photoshops's settings. I'm wary of changing them though, since I've been working with them for so long. Perhaps a little experimentation would do no harm however...
Here's what I think will happen:
You'll change your Photoshop setting to Monitor RGB. Now, all your previous PSD files will likely have saved with whatever your previous profile was (be it Adobe RGB, or whatever). When you open them up now, you'll get prompted with a few options for handling the changeover (or, depending on your settings, it might just tell you that it's discarding the embedded profile, and you won't get any other options). You might have already experienced this if you ever opened images from the web (which are often embedded with the sRGB profile -- unless your working space is currently sRGB, so it didn't need to change anything).
Either way, when you open it and discard the embedded profile, it might look different. You can fix this though by not discarding the profile, but by converting it.
If it prompts you with options, choose "Convert document colors to the working space" instead of discarding. If you don't get this option, go back to Color Settings, look down at "Profile Mismatches:" and check the box for, "Ask When Opening." Without this, Adobe's default behavior is to discard embedded profiles that mismatch your working space. Converting is the best way to change a document's profile without altering the way it looks. I think (this is one of those, "try it yourself, I might be remembering wrong here" situations).
Save the document after doing this so it doesn't ask again every time you open it. In general, to avoid doing this all the time, I make sure to uncheck the "Embed..." option at the bottom of Save dialogues so it doesn't embed my monitor profile in every document I make. This can especially be the case if you ever use a different monitor, because it'll try to load up the other monitor profile on the new monitor. So as a rule, I don't embed unless I come across a specific need to do so (and that hasn't come up yet).
And yeah, me and my dad are desktop publishers, but commercial printers only print in CMYK.
I probably didn't even need to mention CMYK, I was just making the point that beyond grasping that concept, I still consider myself "head under" with the whole color thing. I'm trying my best though.