Wind&water Manual To Download..

[Trip]

Hi all,
I've spent a little time this week putting together a mini manual to be used with gmenu2x for Yuan-Works Wind and Water: Puzzle Battles.
It's not quite finished yet as the fonts a bit crap & needs some more work, but I thought I'd post it to show you all & get feedback about anything else that you think can be improved upon.

I've hosted it on Image Shack here:



..and it's also on the standards site here!

I can't really show you what it looks like here, as the image is too big to post directly & it may also take a little while to load up on either page, so please be patient.


Explanation of manuals for YuanHao & anyone else that's interested:
Due to the open nature of the GP2X handheld, most programs use different key layouts etc. for controls. This is good from a developers point of view (offers a lot of freedom), but can be a real pain for the average user as they always have to read the text file & try to remember the different controls for each program.

DawnOfTheRent came up with the original idea of a basic image file that showed the control layout, but since then the idea has evolved to become more like the old computer game manuals that used to ship with C64/Atari/etc. games. You can include whatever information you like within them.. backstories for characters or the game itself, key layouts, hints & tips, cheats, art work.. You get the general idea

They're easy for the average user to make & easy for developers to implement into alternative menu frontends, or even directly into the programs themselves. They also give the GP2X system a very useful & unique feature IMHO.

More in depth info on the manuals can be found here!

Hope you like it

 

[jimmyslam]

Have you done that ??? It is a bit strange.
Anyway that is not a manual is a teaser more than anything.

Yuan Works probably have a complete manual then they release the game.

Is a commercial game...

 

[Yuan]

Hi! Hey, you used my graphics~!! I'm gonna sue you!! Haha

Thanks a lot for your effort, it looks really interesting.

We'll upload Rosewind's portrait soon so can use her picture instead of the black outline only!

Looking great, thank you for your time!

Yuan

 

[Trip]

Have you done that ??? It is a bit strange.
Anyway that is not a manual is a teaser more than anything.

Yuan Works probably have a complete manual then they release the game.

Is a commercial game...

I didn't do the graphics, they came from screenshots of the game & from Yuan-Works different web sites. I just modified them all to build up the manual.

Strange.. You mean that I didn't add controls to the manual like I normally would?
The games got a fantastic in-game tutorial for things like controls & gameplay, so I didn't see much point in adding them. I decided to just give a general overview of the games features & back stories of the characters instead

Yeh they'll probably do a full professional game manual on release, but it won't be viewable from gmenu2x . Besides, this was a great way of learning more features of the gimp & improveing my graphics skills.

Hi! Hey, you used my graphics~!! I'm gonna sue you!! Haha

Sorry Yuan, but I'm unemployed & broke lol

We'll upload Rosewind's portrait soon so can use her picture instead of the black outline only!

Sweet.. thanks
It's a shame that I don't have the talent to do pixel art myself (yet).

 

[jimmyslam]

Have you done that ??? It is a bit strange.
Anyway that is not a manual is a teaser more than anything.

Yuan Works probably have a complete manual then they release the game.

Is a commercial game...

I didn't do the graphics, they came from screenshots of the game & from Yuan-Works different web sites. I just modified them all to build up the manual.

Strange.. You mean that I didn't add controls to the manual like I normally would?
The games got a fantastic in-game tutorial for things like controls & gameplay, so I didn't see much point in adding them. I decided to just give a general overview of the games features & back stories of the characters instead

Yeh they'll probably do a full professional game manual on release, but it won't be viewable from gmenu2x . Besides, this was a great way of learning more features of the gimp & improveing my graphics skills.

Hi! Hey, you used my graphics~!! I'm gonna sue you!! Haha

Sorry Yuan, but I'm unemployed & broke lol

We'll upload Rosewind's portrait soon so can use her picture instead of the black outline only!

Sweet.. thanks
It's a shame that I don't have the talent to do pixel art myself (yet).

Yeah I ment Strange cause it didnt have anything explaining how to play.

I understand now, i didnt read the first sentence well (the part that says is for Gmenu), sorry!!
Is quite nice then.

 

[krosfyah]

It looks awesome. Great work.

This next point is rather moot since Yuan already posted but with it being a commercial game and everything, did you ask permission before making it?

 

[Yuan]

Hi there.

Yeah, he asked for permission, even before posting. He sent us an e-mail to Yuan Works to ask if it was okay to post this; we have no problems with it. In fact, we are FLATTERED that someones takes the time to do this.

In fact, since we've been busy (especially with Wind and Water) we haven't had the chance to "play around" with our GP2X, and we didn't even know about this feature before he e-mailed us

All those people using it to play games, and we use it mostly to work and test right now T___T

Well, gotta go work on some of the hidden mini-games

See you around.

 

[Trip]

Cheers all.
I just need to find a decent font now that looks good on the 2x's small screen.
Any idea's?

p.s. Goodluck to everyone at Yuan Works when you officialy launch the game btw

 

[rokdcasbah]

Cheers all.
I just need to find a decent font now that looks good on the 2x's small screen.
Any idea's?

p.s. Goodluck to everyone at Yuan Works when you officialy launch the game btw

in my opinion pixel/bitmap fonts always look best with limited screen space. you don't want to be "wasting" pixels on hinting & anti-aliasing when you don't have them to spare.

check out bitmapmania, for starters, some very nice ones on there. also 04.

 

[fusion_power]

I like the manual-Feature of the GMenu2X. It's really useful and the GFX-Manuals are really stylish. Problem of course is the bigger file-Size and increased loading-Time compared to plain .txt Manuals.
Maybe the file size can be reduced when only small Graphics for the Button layout or important game-pics are used and the rest of the manual graphic is transulent (.png rulez ) It also has the advantage, that it fit in any Gmenu skin. Would be cool if there could be a "manual standard" ore something ^^

@Yuan; You really should try the famous "GMenu2X" when you have time.

 

[Trip]

in my opinion pixel/bitmap fonts always look best with limited screen space. you don't want to be "wasting" pixels on hinting & anti-aliasing when you don't have them to spare.

check out bitmapmania, for starters, some very nice ones on there. also 04.

Cheers rokdcasbah, I'll look into that a little more

Problem of course is the bigger file-Size and increased loading-Time compared to plain .txt Manuals.

Yeh I noticed that too
I do plan on running some tests, to see which is the best level to save png's at per amount of page's. I'm a little stuck at the moment as my units bricked & I havn't even seen this manual on a GP2X yet lol.

Gunna have to wait a month or two I suppose <_<

 

[YuanHao]

Hi, again Tripmonkey thanks for the manual looks great !

It's hard to get a small filesize in PNG anyway since the images are a bit lossy, btw I'm sorry for your GP2X hehe

@fusion_power: We've seen screenshots of GP2XMenu and it looks great, especially the shortcuts. However, as you may guess, we haven't been able to fully use our GP2X just casual emulation since 99% of the time we turn on a GP2X (which varies between 10 and 100 times a day maybe) it's used to debug/play Wind And Water! Well I hope after the game I can test everything! hehe

 

[fusion_power]

Problem of course is the bigger file-Size and increased loading-Time compared to plain .txt Manuals.

Yeh I noticed that too
I do plan on running some tests, to see which is the best level to save png's at per amount of page's. I'm a little stuck at the moment as my units bricked & I havn't even seen this manual on a GP2X yet lol.

Gunna have to wait a month or two I suppose <_<

As I mentioned in another forum, it seems, that always the important and creative devs have to deal with broken PC's or GP2X devices... Is there a curse or something? Bad voodoo from Sony and Nintendo?
And there are tools to reduce the file-size of png's. But as I sayed before, maybe It would be an idea to put only the important things in the manual-pix like controlls or game-options, lots of transparency, no backgrounds and so on.

Hi, again Tripmonkey thanks for the manual looks great !

It's hard to get a small filesize in PNG anyway since the images are a bit lossy, btw I'm sorry for your GP2X hehe

@fusion_power: We've seen screenshots of GP2XMenu and it looks great, especially the shortcuts. However, as you may guess, we haven't been able to fully use our GP2X just casual emulation since 99% of the time we turn on a GP2X (which varies between 10 and 100 times a day maybe) it's used to debug/play Wind And Water! Well I hope after the game I can test everything! hehe

Look's, like you guys work really hard on the game the whole day. I hope, you still have fun to play it. ^^
Now, that we have a working CPS2 Emu, I more play Puzzle Fighter on GP2X. This little "Vexed" puzzlegame isn't bad too. But of course I'm waiting for new Versions of Wind and Water. Its always interesting for me to see, how a game "grows" and gets better, get more features and cleaned up.

 

[YuanHao]

And there are tools to reduce the file-size of png's. But as I sayed before, maybe It would be an idea to put only the important things in the manual-pix like controlls or game-options, lots of transparency, no backgrounds and so on.

Now that I think about it, Irfamview is good for PNG optimization, maybe I'll try to run it.

Look's, like you guys work really hard on the game the whole day. I hope, you still have fun to play it. ^^
Now, that we have a working CPS2 Emu, I more play Puzzle Fighter on GP2X. This little "Vexed" puzzlegame isn't bad too. But of course I'm waiting for new Versions of Wind and Water. Its always interesting for me to see, how a game "grows" and gets better, get more features and cleaned up.

Thanks BTW what coincidence, he just added a new entry to our blog with couple of screenshots

 

[PokeParadox]

Now that I think about it, Irfamview is good for PNG optimization, maybe I'll try to run it.

Yeah, somethng I discussed with TripMonkey was converting the PNG manual to PNG8. It should reduce the size considerably and not suffer too much with quality. It's just not easy to try anything out without a GP2X I guess! I'm in the same position right now. My GP2X has gone on holiday to Germany to have some plastic surgery.

 

[fusion_power]

Very interesting picture, Ark.

I'm use only IrfanView to watch pix on my PC. Great little program. ^^ But I never discovered the advanced options for png-file format. Looks, like it's based on Ken Silvermans png-optimize-program. (for History-friends: Ken was the guy who made the famous "Build-Engine" used for Duke Nukem 3D and Shadow Warior )

I had done a quick redo of the manual without the white background and with many trancparency as possible...but even with the png-optimizing routines of I-View the File is still 1,2MB. The only way to make it smaller is to use a limited 256 Color palette like in .gif Images...of course then the pix look a little bit color-pixelated. Hmm...

 

[PokeParadox]

Ok, I did some *quick* optimising with ImageReady. This is now PNG8 and much smaller. I think it looks ok. Not amazing, but not bad for 2 minutes of tweaking settings.

Anyway, someone test it out on their GP2X and see if it improves loading time (It should) and that it displays correctly(again it should!).

Optimised Manual

 

[YuanHao]

Ok, I did some *quick* optimising with ImageReady. This is now PNG8 and much smaller. I think it looks ok. Not amazing, but not bad for 2 minutes of tweaking settings.

Anyway, someone test it out on their GP2X and see if it improves loading time (It should) and that it displays correctly(again it should!).

Optimised Manual

Looks good actually the image that lost most quality is the last one (blue background) but it's not too important anyway. What's the file size?

EDIT: 276 KB total file size in PNG 8!

 

[Yuan]

Hello there.

Well, experience has taught me that the best way to reduce color without losing quality is to edit the images pixel by pixel themselves~!

But there are very few crazy people like me left, so I guess PNG is okay

I'd recommend to first reduce the color in a controlled way, for instance saving a *.gif in photoshop or similar program testing with the different color representation patterns and color numbers to see which one best fits all the images in common, and THEN make it a *.png. Any other similar procedure would greatly help avoid those "floating pixels" in solid colors.

Hope that helps in any way. Looking good. Hope you get a (working) GP2X soon!

 

[fusion_power]

Ok, I did some *quick* optimising with ImageReady. This is now PNG8 and much smaller. I think it looks ok. Not amazing, but not bad for 2 minutes of tweaking settings.

Anyway, someone test it out on their GP2X and see if it improves loading time (It should) and that it displays correctly(again it should!).

Optimised Manual

Ímpressive. I had 380KB PNG with a 256Color palette. But my version had a more "dot-like" pixelatesd graphic, especially in the last image. ^^
by the way, I think the final Manual could have more "how to play" explanations, "what does what" and less Character-descriptions ^^

And by the way, without transparencies, Gmenu2X could accept simple .jpg manual graphix ^^""