I did a lot of OSDM demos recently and thought that I should share some tips and tricks about the tool, especially the scripting feature, which I use almost exclusively for controlling the flow of my own OSDM production. I would like to start with high-lighting some of the new cool feature that became available with the April or June, 2010 versions of the Oldskool Demomaker tool by Peace/Testaware.. You can find all my own production at the special OSDM section here on my site. There you can also find additional resources, tools and more related to the Oldskool Demomaker, like my OSDM Script Cheat Sheet, Tutorials and my VOBJ Vector Object manipulation tool and more. Table of Contents Dynamic Layer Ordering Vector Object Control Addition to (Sprite) Cloning Feature Macros Dynamic Layer Ordering I remember when I first checked out OSDM. The interface was not very intuitive, but what???s new when it comes to scene stuff (Elite has to suffer or something like that hehe) and I struggled with a couple specific issues. One of which was the rendering order of effects on the screen (= what is in front and what is in the back ground etc.) Only when Peace himself explained to me in detail how the ???Storyboard??? page in the ???Regie??? tab worked, did I finally realized how this is being accomplished. It didn???t even occur to me when I looked at the interface myself that you can do more on that page than just controlling
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Here is a little tutorial for OSDM. I will add it later to the OSDM Wiki as well. Oldskool Demomaker does not support animated GIFs or any other animation/video format, but it is capable of rendering something like an animation via the work-around, which is called ???Frame Animation Images???. This is basically a generic flat image in PNG, JPG or other format supported by OSDM, which contains all frames for the animation. The only thing you have to do is tell OSDM how many frames the image contains and it will automatically slice up the image into equal size pieces, which are then shown one after another, with the speed of changing from one frame to another, depending on the value for ???delay??? that also needs to be specified for a frame animation image. The Logo feature supports ???Vertical Frame Animations??? and the Sprites and Bounce Bobs features support ???Horizontal Frame Animations???. The difference between the two is how the frames are arranged within the image; Vertical means on top of each other and horizontal means that they are arranged next to each other. Example: Frame animation image dimensions: 200??200 pixels, Number of frames: 2 – Vertical Frame Animation Frame Size: 200??100 pixels or – Horizontal Frame Animation Frame Size: 100??200 pixels Creating Frame Animations Now, those frame animation images are hard to create by hand, because you have to be very precise. It is also virtually impossible to proper align the content within each frame to get a smooth
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I wrote a couple months ago a tutorial for the OSDM Wiki for the creation of my Oldskool Demomaker multi-part demo production ???New World Order???. Unfortunately does it appear to be the case that the tutorial was not indexed by search engines like Google yet, so I decided to republish it at my personal blog once more that people will be able to find it, if they are searching for content like this. Overview New World Order??? – Multipart Demo by Roy/SAC Created in January 2010 with the Oldskool Demomaker (OSDM) V2.01.140 by Peace/Testaware Watch the Video Capture of the Demo and download the Win32 executable here. OSDM Settings File Location: Data\Prefs\Roy – NewWorldOrder-fs.ini (zip download NWOPrefsIni.zip (6.84 KiB) Download All Resources, Images, Objects, Ini, Screen Shots, Tutorial in TXT format and Win32 Exe of the Demo in one ZIP archive here NWO TUt.zip NWO (4.9 MB) The Demo Parts First a break-down of the individual demo parts and which OSDM effects were used for each of those parts. 1. Roy/SAC is Back – Bounce Bobs Effect 2. Roy/SAC Proudly Presents – Sprites Effect – 3D Ball Effect 3. NWO Logo Animation – Sprites Effect 4. Vector Stars – 3D Vector Effect 5. Text and Copper Bars – Mask Effect – Star field Effect – Copper Bars Effect – Amiga Text Effect 6. 3D Balls Carpet – Plasma Effect – Star field Effect – 3D Ball Effect 7. Big Scroller – Plasma Effect – Star field Effect – Scroll Text
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Uh, the month of March 2010 is almost over and I did not write a post in the entire month. Mhh.. I have actually a bunch of things to write about, but did not get around actually doing it. Well, I will provide some brief updates. Megatro III Release I released another Megatro Intro pack with my latest OSDM productions. The menu system was coded by myself again and I hope that I was also able to improve on it since Megatro II. For details and download links check out the dedicated page for this release. Since the release of Megatro III I did create already several other productions as well. You might want to check out my OSDM homepage to check it out. OSDM Vector Object Resources Vector Objects for OSDM are hard to create and have more than one person already driven close to insanity. But there are some lights at the end of the tunnel, which could help until a vector object editor will be implemented into OSDM itself. Creation of Vector Objects Tutorial written by Wildcop (in German only, unfortunately) Notes to 3D Vectors (from the OSDM feature notes at the OSDM Wiki) VOBJ Tool V1.5beta written by me, which provides some nice features that make the work with the VOBJ data files much easier. Features like Merge of 2 VOBJ files, cloning of objects, shifting, flipping, centering, rotating etc. Also new is a Vector Object Creator for the creation of some basic vector objects, such[…]