A way to make player invisible?

[ReFiX]

Hey guys, kinda new here so I apologize if I'm posting this in the wrong area or something about this has already been posted, my search came up empty.

Anyways, I'm looking to see if there is a way to make the character you are playing invisible. I'm looking to make a few GIFs out of some scenarios in game but having a hard time getting most of them due the character being in the scene. Anyone have any idea of a way to do this or possibly a workaround?

I can post up a few I've done so far if anyone is interested

[eriktorbjorn]

Anyways, I'm looking to see if there is a way to make the character you are playing invisible. I'm looking to make a few GIFs out of some scenarios in game but having a hard time getting most of them due the character being in the scene. Anyone have any idea of a way to do this or possibly a workaround?

I don't know of any way. Well, not without modifying the ScummVM source code, at least.

If that's not an option, I'd probably just make one screenshot, move the character, then make another screenshot and try to cut and paste them together. Though depending on the game and the scene, that may be tricky.

I know I've seen tools (not related to ScummVM) for extracting images from the LucasArts games, and there may be for some other the others games as well. But that might not work well either, if there are object in the scene that are drawn separately.

[ReFiX]

Thanks for the quick reply!

If it comes down to having to edit single image frames I guess that's what I'll have to do, although it will still totally be worth it

How hard do you think it would be edit the source code? Or is that out of the question?

[eriktorbjorn]

How hard do you think it would be edit the source code? Or is that out of the question?

Depends on how comfortable you are with C++ and compiling ScummVM yourself, I guess. And on the particular game engine. ScummVM is a collection of different game engines, so different games may have very different ways of handling the actors.

[ReFiX]

How hard do you think it would be edit the source code? Or is that out of the question?

Depends on how comfortable you are with C++ and compiling ScummVM yourself, I guess. And on the particular game engine. ScummVM is a collection of different game engines, so different games may have very different ways of handling the actors.

Unfortunately I'm a complete noob when it comes to coding I wonder if anyone else has ever taken the time to do something like this? I'll search around some more.

[corpse]

I may be wrong, but I think Scumm Revisited, can extract backgrounds. I'm sure you can find it on google. If not I can post a link later.

[ReFiX]

I may be wrong, but I think Scumm Revisited, can extract backgrounds. I'm sure you can find it on google. If not I can post a link later.

Thanks for the suggestion! I got a hold of Scumm Revisited and a few other programs, but now I have no clue what I'm doing haha. I can view the background image and other objects but is there a way to view the background image while animation is happening? All the backgrounds are just stills.

[MusicallyInspired]

Usually animated backgrounds actually consist of the backgrounds and then animated sprites of pieces of the background (like the main character) rendered on top. So I don't think Scumm Revisited will help you here. Unless it's a palette cycle effect (like the lava under the monkey head in SMI) which is actually the background animating by cycling through certain sections of the colour palette in real time. A fun effect from Deluxe Paint, which all of the early ScummVM VGA games used for their backgrounds.

I don't believe Scumm Revisited can recreate this palette cycling effect either, though I could be wrong.

[eriktorbjorn]

A fun effect from Deluxe Paint, which all of the early ScummVM VGA games used for their backgrounds.

Speaking of which, there are some pretty impressive examples of "Old School Color Cycling with HTML5". I don't think I've seen any game that used it to such dramatic effect, though.

[raina]

If you can position your character freely in the scene you wish to capture, you could record the sequence twice with the character standing in different positions, and then crop and combine the frames to get a scene without it.

[ReFiX]

If you can position your character freely in the scene you wish to capture, you could record the sequence twice with the character standing in different positions, and then crop and combine the frames to get a scene without it.

Yeah, this is what I had to do with a few of them and hopefully wont have to continue doing if I can find a way around this haha.

I don't believe Scumm Revisited can recreate this palette cycling effect either, though I could be wrong.

Yeah, if anyone knows of a program that can do this, let me know. The 2 versions of Scumm Revisited don't seem to be able to do this but I could just be overlooking something..


EDIT: Okay guys, thanks for all the suggestions! I managed to find 2 gif programs that make this super easy and I don't have to edit 100s of frames Should I post some here?