Graphic techniques in game production

Capturing a Screen Shot

Screen Grabbing on Macs

Macs come with an inbuilt program called Grab, which you can use to take screenshots of the whole screen or a portion of a screen. Further information needs to be presented here for Mac and Linux - some info on using Windows XP follows.

Windows XP

Some details on capturing a screen shot in Windows XP here.

The technique explained at the link above also works extremely well with GIMP 2.* and is better for us since we can currently upload jpg files to Wikiversity .... but not bmp files? GIMP also allows import of BMP files so you can use the above technique and email the file to someone else (like me) with GIMP installed willing to convert it for you.

In XP Take your screen save by pushing the Prt Scrn button then in GIMP open a new file, choose the size of your screen; then use Edit, Paste into New. The image appears scaled within the new file frame. Save the file as a jpeg by clicking the little button at bottem of the Save As dialog and selecting jpeg from among all the available formats. Click Save and then when the dialog informs you it must export first to flatten the layer stack tell it Ok. It processes the file and saves under the name and path you provided.

Notice any of these can be used later for texture and sprite creation if we can find an import file format compatible with Art of Illusion, I hope you are reading the Art of Illusion manual and/or tutorials on your own in the background as you proceed along this trial!

Editor's note: Screen capture file format conversion needs to be doublechecked in GIMP procedure above. It was a bit tricky and I wrote it from memory. Erase this note when it is confirmed the revised procedure works well for GIMP novices. Thanks! Mirwin 04:10, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Use of Parallax and tiles in Sidescroller

This image [1] is a good candidate for editing in Adobe Photoshop or the GIMP to create a sidescroller tileset. With proper editing following proper lines (roughly horizontal not too obviously repeating) we should be able to simulate being in a vehicle traveling slowly along a line of ridges. Two or three planes are established and the tiles in the planes farthest into the screen from the viewer move at a proportional distance to the illusion of depth one wishes to create.

What makes this a good candidate is the two roughly horizontal planes which will allow us to: Mirror the image; splice it to itself (either edge will match its mirror image). Copies of this are then edited to provide horizontal masses with transparent space above for other moving ridgelines.

This can be done off of the photograph(s) for preliminary prototyping and storyboarding and the photograph (NASA free use to the entire public) used for texture and color creation for 3d models of landscape. Then the rendered images are delivered in the format specified (into which the early tileset has been converted) and the tileset task/process is complete.