MrSteve81

http://www.facebook.com/pista.zeleny My face. Add me if you so desire.

mrsteve81

I always used to love Rajaa's stuff. Had a few chats with him back in the day, and I must say I found him to be rather a nice fellow.

You sir, win the internet.

No probs. We would all like to see what you can make with it.http://mugenfreeforall.com/public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/smile.png

The RGB method This is in my opinion the best way to create stages that are rich in colour. It takes a lot less time than the jigsaw method, and looks so much better. In case you don't know RGB stands for red, green, blue, and its the mixture of these 3 colours that produce every colour you see on your monitor. I'm not going to go into the science, but if you want to read more on it I'm sure google can help you out. For this tutorial I'm going to be using photoshop but the theory is the same in paint shop pro. I just don't know how to do it exactly in PSP as I've never used it. First of all you're going to need an image. As what I'm going to show you will seem like a piece of cake once you know it, that's what I'm going to use. Open it up in your image editor of choice and then create another layer on top of it. Use the paint bucket tool to fill this new layer red. For best results make sure the RGB number of the colour is 255,0,0. You should now see a plain red image. On the bottom right of the screen you can see the layers. Make sure the red layer is selected and change the blending mode to darken. You can now see this if you've done it correctly: Now we need to make it an image you can use in mugen. A 256 colour image. Click image>mode>indexed colour. Flatten the image when prompted and then from the drop down menu select exact. Then from the same drop down menu select custom. Make the bottom right colour 1 you wont be using ever. I choose 255,0,255. Its that rank purple colour that everyone chooses for their backgrounds. Click ok until you get out of that section and then save your image as a .pcx. Repeat for the green and blue. Add these 3 sprites to your .sff in the usual manner. I'm going to assume you've made a single layer stage at this point so I wont go into what everything in the coding means. If you haven't I suggest doing that and learning basic stages before doing this. The thing you'll need to do next is the coding for the stage. Code the 3 sprites as you would code just 1, but for the coding of the 2nd and 3rd sprite add 1 line: trans = add. Now test it out and see the glory of your excellence. If you have any problems, as always just ask.

This part of the tutorial will be covering the coding in the system.def file concerning the title screen. I have copy pasted the entire thing so you can see what it looks like. system.def wrote: [Title Info] fadein.time = 10 fadeout.time = 10 menu.pos = 159,158 menu.item.font = 3,0,0 menu.item.active.font = 3,5,0 menu.item.spacing = 0, 13 menu.itemname.arcade = "ARCADE" menu.itemname.versus = "VS MODE" menu.itemname.teamarcade = "TEAM ARCADE" menu.itemname.teamversus = "TEAM VS" menu.itemname.teamcoop = "TEAM CO-OP" menu.itemname.survival = "SURVIVAL" menu.itemname.survivalcoop = "SURVIVAL CO-OP" menu.itemname.training = "TRAINING" menu.itemname.watch = "WATCH" menu.itemname.options = "OPTIONS" menu.itemname.exit = "EXIT" ; These parameters define the window in which the items are visible ; in. menu.window.margins.y = 12, 8 menu.window.visibleitems = 5 menu.boxcursor.visible = 1 ;Set to 0 to disable default cursor display menu.boxcursor.coords = -58,-10,57,2 ; These are the sounds for cursor movement cursor.move.snd = 100,0 cursor.done.snd = 100,1 cancel.snd = 100,2 ;---------------------------- ;Title background definition [TitleBGdef] bgclearcolor = 0,0,0 [TitleBG 0] type = parallax spriteno = 5, 1 start = 0, 145 width = 400, 1200 yscalestart = 100 yscaledelta = 1 tile = 1,1 velocity = -1 [TitleBG 1] type = normal spriteno = 5, 2 start = -160, 145 trans = sub [TitleBG 2] type = normal spriteno = 5,0 start = 0, 10 tile = 1,2 velocity = -1 mask = 0 [TitleBG 3] type = normal spriteno = 0,0 start = 0, 40 mask = 1 trans = add It might look quite complicated at this point but there are only 2 different things that are possible to play with here, and neither has to be difficult. So lets have a closer look at each section. system.def wrote: [Title Info] fadein.time = 10 fadeout.time = 10 menu.pos = 159,158 This is where your menu will appear. Change the numbers to see the affects it has. menu.item.font = 3,0,0 This tells mugen which font to use for the menu. You can change your fonts as I've shown in a previous tutorial. menu.item.active.font = 3,5,0 The font used when the menu selection is selected. In this case it is a simple colour change. menu.item.spacing = 0, 13 How far apart the selections will appear. The first number is the x axis (left and right), the second, the y axis (up and down) menu.itemname.arcade = "ARCADE" Changing the words in the " " will change the names of the modes. For instance say you wanted Arcade mode to be called Hero mode you would change "ARCADE" to "HERO". menu.itemname.versus = "VS MODE" menu.itemname.teamarcade = "TEAM ARCADE" menu.itemname.teamversus = "TEAM VS" menu.itemname.teamcoop = "TEAM CO-OP" menu.itemname.survival = "SURVIVAL" menu.itemname.survivalcoop = "SURVIVAL CO-OP" menu.itemname.training = "TRAINING" menu.itemname.watch = "WATCH" menu.itemname.options = "OPTIONS" menu.itemname.exit = "EXIT" menu.window.margins.y = 12, 8 This deals with how big the selection window is. If you are using the default mugen fonts I suggest changing it to 12, 5. Looks tidier. menu.window.visibleitems = 5 How many selections are visible. menu.boxcursor.visible = 1 Change to 0 if you don't want a box around your current selection. menu.boxcursor.coords = -58,-10,57,2 How big the box is. You can delete this line if you don't want a box. cursor.move.snd = 100,0 The sounds that will be made when changing your selection. I will deal with sound in another part of the tutorial. cursor.done.snd = 100,1 cancel.snd = 100,2 See how easy that was? Mess about with the numbers, find something you like while thinking about how you want your background images to look. You should think about that because its the next section we will cover. system.def wrote: [TitleBGdef] bgclearcolor = 0,0,0 [TitleBG 0] type = parallax spriteno = 5, 1 start = 0, 145 width = 400, 1200 yscalestart = 100 yscaledelta = 1 tile = 1,1 velocity = -1 [TitleBG 1] type = normal spriteno = 5, 2 start = -160, 145 trans = sub [TitleBG 2] type = normal spriteno = 5,0 start = 0, 10 tile = 1,2 velocity = -1 mask = 0 [TitleBG 3] type = normal spriteno = 0,0 start = 0, 40 mask = 1 trans = add If you have ever made more than a very basic 1 layer stage then this section should make absolute sense to you. If not then don't worry its easy. And I'm going to teach you as well. Each of the [TitleBG] sections is a separate layer. It doesn't matter what they are called after the TitleBG bit but they need that at the start or it wont work properly. Lets have a look at the most complicated layer here, [TitleBG 0] system.def wrote: [TitleBG 0] The layers name. type = parallax Parallax means the sprite will scroll across the screen, normal will mean a static, non moving sprite. spriteno = 5, 1 The sprite number in the .sff we had a quick look at in the last lesson. start = 0, 145 The sprites start position. width = 400, 1200 This section I don't have a firm understanding of yet, but increasing the numbers makes it move faster. yscalestart = 100 yscaledelta = 1 tile = 1,1 velocity = -1 As this is the bottom layer there is no need for one of the most important lines of coding in it. Mask. By putting the line mask = 1 in the coding for each layer the colour you chose as your transparent colour when you added your sprite will not be shown. There is also a line you can add called trans. By adding this you can decide if the whole sprite will be transparent or not. Just add trans = sub, trans = add or trans = add1 and check the results. Using these 2 tutorials you should be able to create a new title screen for mugen. If you have any problems just post here, or send me a PM if you want to keep your screenpack a secret until its release.