Lemma Soft Forums

Greetings,

Okay, continuing where I left off. I'm still trying to create a good-looking main window for a cyberpunk-styled fiction piece of mine, which in my understanding involves placing both text and graphics inside a stylised computer monitor. I thought about using a fixed background, which is that of said monitor (monitor.jpg) on a layer of its own (monitor), and to display all game graphics (Characters, Background, etc.) atop of it, and realized it with code like that:


And it worked. But then I remembered that them old monitors used line scan, due to which anything displayed on it looked as if striped. I can give an example, which is the Fallout 3 hacking screen - if you look closely, you will notice them scanlines. So I decided to implement that effect somehow in my project; I remembered that in another Ren'Py game, "Digital: A Love Story", I saw that effect implemented nicely, so I though about analysing its code, but since it is such a complicated game my brain bled too much and I gave up. So, my first question would be whether anyone smarter than me could create a nice Ren'Py cookbook entry about making a TV scanlines effect ^_^

But, being a bit stubborn, I tried to tinker with Ren'Py and find a solution of my own. I devised an algorythm (which didn't work as I expected, though), which involves creating another layer (scanlines), on which a transparent image with scanlines would be displayed (scanlines.png), overlaying all underlying layers. The code is as follows:


And it worked, kind of. Scanlines overlayed the graphics and text nicely, making it look as if both game graphics and text are printed on my stylized "computer monitor". But then I suddenly found out that scanlines overlayed not only the graphics area, but all game menus - pause, save, load, preferences, etc., - rendering them useless. So I tried to locate on which layer the menus were rendered, and identified it as 'screens'; so by changing the code from


to


I managed to get scanlines off the menus; but the drawback was that it disappeared from over the text, too, which means that text is rendered on 'screens' layer too! I wanted the scanlines to overlay the text but stay off the menus, so I tried to create a new layer ('textarea') for the text and put it below the 'scanlines' layer, while 'screens' layer remained atop, by editing the screens.rpy. But there I did'n find any statement which states on which layer the ADV-style text should be rendered! I tried to add the 'onlayer textarea' statement here and there, like:


but it always resulted in an error:


So if nobody could write a cookbook article for TV scanlines effect, then my second question is as following: could I re-define on which layer the ADV-style text frames should be rendered while leaving menu screens on their pre-defined 'screens' layer?

Thanks for you effort and my sicnerest apologies for writing such a long and brain-exhausting post,
--
S.

Your best bet would be to add the code:



To your game. This will cause the scanlines layer to be cleared when you enter the out-of-game menus, which I think would give you what you want. An alternative approach might also be to show the scanlines on a screen with zorder -1, so that it shows on the screens layer, but below everything else on that layer.

_________________
"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face in marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming" - Theodore Roosevelt

Thanks; it worked, this, I mean:


Would appreciate a cookbook entry on TV scanlines effect, though ^_^