How to get a crowd-walking-in-the-background anim-- [SOLVED]

[pyopyon]

Full question: "How to get a crowd-walking-in-the-background animation?"

Hello, sorry if my question is a little vague in the topic, but basically, I played Katawa Shoujo and I noticed that there is a portion where they're walking in a crowd of basically shadow people whose faces you can't see--

I couldn't figure it out so I wanted to ask; is there a way to recreate this effect to imply that the characters are among many people, or must it be done by some sort of hand drawn animation?

[XxrenxX]

I've never done this before but I have heard of people doing it. As far as I know you can't just use one image and add a filter, it's an animation. One thing I have seen is someone makes the 'shadow people' in say, flash and then just moves them around, saves the file as a gif or something else renpy supports and tada, moving background. There's some background artists in the recruitment part of the thread, it may be best to find one that does it and ask them if they have an answer. Sorry I can't help more =p You can do something like this in photoshop as well.

[Donmai]

Hi, pyopyon. I've seen some old threads here in this forum named "How to recreate the xyz effect in the xyz game" or something like that... Today they are not very common. Of course, copying other people ideas is a bad idea in itself but, when we are learning, I believe it's okay.

It seems that "walking crowd" is a simple animation. The original code is certainly much better than my humble effort. When we become coding experts, in the future, we could always improve it. My idea is to declare an image as an ATL block. You will need three or four different images of the crowd. Then we create this code:

Code: Select all

image walking_crowd:
    "crowd1.png" with Dissolve(0.6, alpha = True) # shows the image with a transition
    0.8 # a pause of 0.8 sec before the next image
    "crowd2.png" with Dissolve(0.6, alpha = True) # alpha=True to preserve transparency
    0.8
    "crowd3.png" with Dissolve(0.6, alpha = True)
    0.8
    repeat # creates a loop

I've created a small demo showing how to make characters appear in front and behind the "crowd". Just unzip it to your projects folder an run it from the launcher.

[pyopyon]

I'm sorry- it seems that I forgot to say thank you!! Sorry about that.

I really appreciate it- it's totally improved the feel of the VN.

[Unin]

If you don't feel like making any new art, and your game has a bunch of different characters, you could just throw their sprites in the background and grey them out with an image matrix. Probably pretty processor intensive though.

http://www.renpy.org/wiki/renpy/doc/coo ... silhouette

[Crazy Li]

If you don't feel like making any new art, and your game has a bunch of different characters, you could just throw their sprites in the background and grey them out with an image matrix. Probably pretty processor intensive though.

http://www.renpy.org/wiki/renpy/doc/coo ... silhouette

I wonder if it would use less resources to just use an image editor to do the same thing and make true silhouette images...