Jaiden

Haha. I don't mind. The colors are nice, but a little heavy on the overlay and contrast I think :P

Go ahead. Just be ready to have all your hard work crumble to pieces when you either don't finish it or Nintendo sends you a C&D.

Haha alright, thank you. I'm surprised the lineart was good, I have really no effective means of lineart than scanning in a pencil drawing outlined in pen and cleaning it up with a mouse.

Just recently finished this up. The only thing that's incomplete is the sprite display, I should be finishing that soon. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98uZnm-oLuY&feature=player_profilepage The picture probably won't stay, I'll fix it up into something nicer later on. But I would love to hear comments and critique on the actual menu design.

The cliffs have nice shape, but overall have a lot of errors in both design and consistency. Try to mix it up a bit instead of them all just being round, and try to keep heights the same with aligned cliffs. Some of the cliffwork south is kind of awkward too.

I'm quite flattered. It's called using photoshop to design a GUI and then what BugSICK mentioned, manually arranging things in frmMain.

@RyokuHasu: > That one word makes me not want to help. Maybe English isn't his first language and he doesn't know how to use the word. It's posts like that that aren't helpful at all, seriously. If you can't help him, don't even post. It's about helping them out, not criticizing their diction. (I do apologize I'm being a bit hypocritical here because I have nothing to say to help his issue, but this bothered me tremendously)

@blkcrow: > i have said that again but… your texture is only dots not realistic at all try making weird shapes and stuff like that and see how it looks It's not meant to be realistic. Let him keep his style, it's unique. It just needs a little bit of modification.

Definitely looking a lot better!

@Ice: > Ah, okay I thought you meant the blades themselves so I added another blade color, i'll try tht now. > > Lukin, I stated that but decided I disliked the grass to even attempt a fix. Well the variation in blade color is good, but there should also be a variation in base color.

No no, now it's just brighter. Keep it that same green, but add a variation of greens under the "blades" of grass that you drew.

Suggestion for the wood floor, add a little more texture like the fence and also do some horizontal lines to make panels. Wood floors aren't just straight boards. For the dirt, it looks good, but you might want to add a little more variation with the colors to give it more depth.

Could use a little more variation in color I think underneath the actual grass detail if you catch my drift, but I like your style a lot.

I love the shading, it's a unique style with a lot of depth.

@Antisora: > Do you happen to know how/have the codes? It's a far larger matter than "having the codes", I can assure you.

Well, it isn't meant to be realistic! I want critique on the actual pixel art, not whether or not it would actually work. And I mentioned in the main post it wasn't 32x32 Quess, it's not suppose to be. Thanks for the positive comments though guys!

Hey everyone, This is my first serious attempt at spiriting a sword. It's fairly simple and isn't the default size. I have thick skin, so I'd really love some critique. 

It isn't on the list, so no. Sorry. Perhaps at a later time.

You certainly have the potential to be a good mapper. Can you spend more than 10 minutes on a map? I'll get back to you once you post it. I may not need a database manager so I'll get back to you on that. Thanks for the interest!

@Robin: > Jaiden, it looks clunky because it's just using the default Origins look. There is a ton of wasted space. > > I created that window to fit in an off-screen spot which was of a fixed size. Having opaque windows on-screen works just fine. Hell, most mainstream games do it. > > It's down to the design being bad rather than making the entire thing translucent. Good point. I should probably put a bit more time into the GUI design. I'm happy to an extent with it, but it's still too much like Origins, you're right about that. I think it's more the shape of things than the layout. I admit it needs to be cleaned up a bit more, but either way the problem presented here is the semi-transparent thing, which I realize now is out of my hands. I will fix up the GUI, it's going to take a hundred modifications to get it right. It's easy to rearrange things for the most part, so I'm not worried about that.

Oh my, that is fantastic. I'd love to have you. You can add me on MSN and we can discuss things further.

Don't sweat it. And yeah I certainly hope there is a workaround. Or someone knowledgeable enough that is willing to help.

@Yami: > Well, another hacky way is to make your windows completely Blt'd, no more clunky windows form elements, and just completely rendered.. this way you can fake transparancy the same way you can do it with tiles, make the top left pixel black, and make what you want 'translucent' in the following pattern: > > oxoxox > xoxoxo > oxoxox > xoxoxo > > X being blank, O being the color to appear as a fake transparent screen. > > It's not a perfect solution, but will save you from rewriting the entire rendering engine. > > EDIT: And no, DirectX7 does not support Alpha channels, making it impossible to add translucent parts to your graphics, which is why most shadows on tilesets from RMXP look so dark and awkward, their Alpha channel isn't recognized. Yeah I do that same crossing method with my tile's shadows. I'm not sure if I want to do that with the windows then. I must have found a DX8 tutorial somewhere then because it actually rendered a picture with a variable opacity so you could actually change the value yourself. But working with that is way over my head. Well, thanks anyway Yami.

@Yami: > You'll need to convert the rendering engine to D3D8 to get a decent result out of this. ;) > > There's no tutorial for this, and only a half assed mockup exists of the start of such a system from Robin quite some time ago.. Your best option is to look into D3D8 rendering yourself, or beg Robin to point you into the right direction. Bummer. Not sure what I'll do about this then. I mean, the windows are closeable right now, but they're still sort of bulky and in the way. This was the optimum solution for my GUI, and I don't think I want to go about redesigning it again. I'd like to ask Robin's help, but I don't think it will do me any good because I barely know what I'm doing when it comes to editing the source and asking directly would just be…bad. There is no efficient way just to render the pics themselves semi-transparent? I mean, I found some code on it somewhere once before but it was so unorganized and nothing was explained that I couldn't do anything with it. Would making separate forms work or be just plain stupid?

This is a big one, and I'm going to admit that I'm looking for more of a tutorial/direct answer than simply a "go here change that" since I know this involves direct draw. How can I make the little GUI pictures (inventory, character, etc) semi-transparent (about 75% opacity) so I can see the screen behind them? Like so: >!  Also, they're not floating and they don't have to be if that helps at all. Thanks.