Tabard designer

BasGoodboy

Heya guys,

As a new feature in my upcoming app game I want to integrate a 'tabard designer'.

Here, as a player, you can make a small drawing, which will appear on you tabard (you're a knight).

Is there any available tutorial of GS where such a thing (drawing of a player and saving this in an image) is done?
Searched a bit, but coudn't find anything.

Best regards,

KevinCross

Why don't you simplify it by providing pre-drawn images that they can build up in layers and position, and maybe colour? Similar to how you design tabards in World of Warcraft.

BoomshackBarry

Yeah there's no way to take a drawing and save it out to a surface/texture/image, but like @KevinCross said you could have pre-designed l]graphics that the player can move around/scale/rotate to create a pattern. Then save these selections in to a table/attributes and use that data to replicate the pattern on to the player character later. It might use a few constrains though so performance could suffer.

I've never played WoW so that reference is wasted on me, but I think this is similar to how you create emblems in Halo

BasGoodboy

@KevinCross @BoomshackBarry that's some good brainstorming boys. I alrdy tought a simplefied version of the self-drawing-tabards, this would stick out nice i think and there is enough to customise if the player can change color, rotation etc.

@BoomshackBarry do you mean by doing such a thing perfomance could suffer? Cause it's more of a bonus-thingy which is nice for the player but not needed and I don't wanna give up performance for such a thing.

Thanks a lot!

BasGoodboy

I never used tables by the way but if this would make the performance go down, I can think of a way not using tables and just using what if-rules to create the tabard.

Like this performance isn't gonna merge too much is my guess.

BoomshackBarry

No what I meant by performance is that, let's say as an example your player has designed a tabard by placing/rotating 5 different graphics. Because you can't 'flatten' these 5 graphics in to a texture, you'd then have to constrain 5 separate actors to your player character, each showing one of the graphics. Lots of constrains are bad for performance. But if your player is not moving (I see you have a static character on screen in your RPG game) then it should be lighter on performance, as you would'nt need to constrain the graphics to the player, as he's not moving anywhere.

KevinCross

You probably could do it without tables but you have to consider how many layers you want your tabard to have, what options you want them to do have control of on each layer i.e. change image, rotate, colour, x and y position, and scale etc. That's about half a dozen attributes per layer if you don't use tables. That's also a lot of saving and loading attributes.

BasGoodboy

Ill probably look into tables first, can't be that hard

BasGoodboy

And @BoomshackBarry I understand what you mean. My game is still quite quick loaded, but I also read if you change all non-moving actors to not-able-to-move in psychics it also makes the game lighter.. don't know if this is a fairytale.