Deltacom

[dilwyn]

I'm trying to find a copy of Deltacom by Manuel Petridis.

It's a program for creating animations, which rather than storing the images as simple consecutive slides, it stores only the changes, a technique of Delta Compression.

The original page is not online anymore, but you can see the page (in German) via the Wayback Machine at http://web.archive.org/web/200111010057 ... pet/ql.htm

[vanpeebles]

That sounds interesting! I was asking along the lines or something similar the other day. How can you create sprites etc for games from screen files?

[dilwyn]

That sounds interesting! I was asking along the lines or something similar the other day. How can you create sprites etc for games from screen files?

That is harder than it sounds on the QL. There are some programs which claim to be able to do this, but I've never tried any of them and can't even remember their titles now.

It's complicated byt he fact that there are two genres of sprites on the QL - the "system sprite" type of sprite, used by the Pointer Environment and the game sprite packages. Now whether any of the game sprite packages have a facility to grab a screen and cut out a part of that screen to transform into a sprite I don't know.

In theory, as long as you know the format of a given sprite type, you could write a small program to load a screen, mark a given area the size of the sprite required, then pixel by pixel build up a sprite in the required format. It does depend on the complexity of the sprites involved, though and no two QL game sprite packages seem to use the same format, so it could prove to be a whole lot more work than I thought.

[stevepoole]

Hi Folks,
There is always the simple solution of using a character-creation routine, then using the cursor command to move it (or them) around the screen. Only ink on paper colours though...
Steve Poole.

[tofro]

The sprite creation program that comes with EasyPtr ("EasySprite") has a feature that allows you to pick up an arbitrary region of a mode 4 or mode 8 screen and save that as a PE sprite.

Tobias