On December 28, 2004 11:38 am, Gary wrote:
> [A non-technical discussion on Palm graphics]
>
> You know the 1-pixel (sometimes 1/2 pixel) outlines
> you see on some sprites? Some people call them
> "halos" - what do you think of those on the Palm?
>
> I've never used them before but on my latest I did -
> in tests, I found it was much easier to distinguish
> individual characters when there were a pile of
> sprites on the screen - this only seemed to apply on
> an actual Palm, because the screen was so small.
>
> I've had mixed reactions from friends - what do you
> guys think? 1-pixel halos help on tiny Palm screens,
> yay or nay?
Yay.
After creating an in-house animation system we discovered, as you did, that
they greatly help in shape recognition. In our worst-case scenario had four
layers of sprites, a background layer, two (foreground and background)
"doodad" layers, and our HUD (a total of 8 layers) and found it became nearly
impossible to differentiate between sprites, much less the order of the
layers.
Now, even the text we use is "halo"ed, maintaining legibility even with
sprites "behind" the text.
This doesn't even go into different bit-depths... our engine works from B&W
into 16-bit and maintains a consistent look. Without the halo, B&W would not
be usable without removing many of the "extra" layers (background & doodads).
--
Matthew Bevan, Margin Software
- Re-inventing the wheel, every time.
Grabel's Law:
2 is not equal to 3 -- not even for large values of 2.
--
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