(I hadn't realised you could browse inside.arc's via Hensa - neat)
Apologies are required. The link you gave does indeed describe Clear in detail, and there's no mention of transparency. Now I'm unsure why I thought this - it could be that I read about the format and saw a review for a scanner package in the same issue of an Acorn Magazine (unlikely), or it could be that the friend I was writing demos with used this method and was decribing it to me (possible).
If I can pursuade my system to startup I'll have a look through my old source code, but I'm sure I dropped the idea for my own prog as it doubled the memory requirements, and I don't know which (if any) other demo to go and look at.
Shame really - I had much higher hopes for my own memory than this...
I've also been trying to find out when John Kortink invented the Clear format with alpha channel. The masking described above is good, but the alpha channel in the clear format was basically a second image in the bitmap file which has a 0 to 255 (greyscale) level which determined how much of the background showed through the sprite.
Unfortunately, my Archimedes isn't in the best of health, so I can't check the documentation. Maybe it's worth emailing John to see when he added the translucency support to the Clear format, but I have a feeling I was playing with it around 1992 when I was demo writing.
Anyone else have more documentation on this ? John's site has the latest version of !Translator up, but that's not what we need - it's the ChangeLog that'd be helpful, and I can't find a PackDir extractor for Solaris at the moment...
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(I hadn't realised you could browse inside .arc's via Hensa - neat)
Apologies are required. The link you gave does indeed describe Clear in detail, and there's no mention of transparency. Now I'm unsure why I thought this - it could be that I read about the format and saw a review for a scanner package in the same issue of an Acorn Magazine (unlikely), or it could be that the friend I was writing demos with used this method and was decribing it to me (possible).
If I can pursuade my system to startup I'll have a look through my old source code, but I'm sure I dropped the idea for my own prog as it doubled the memory requirements, and I don't know which (if any) other demo to go and look at.
Shame really - I had much higher hopes for my own memory than this...
I've also been trying to find out when John Kortink invented the Clear format with alpha channel. The masking described above is good, but the alpha channel in the clear format was basically a second image in the bitmap file which has a 0 to 255 (greyscale) level which determined how much of the background showed through the sprite.
Unfortunately, my Archimedes isn't in the best of health, so I can't check the documentation. Maybe it's worth emailing John to see when he added the translucency support to the Clear format, but I have a feeling I was playing with it around 1992 when I was demo writing.
Anyone else have more documentation on this ? John's site has the latest version of !Translator up, but that's not what we need - it's the ChangeLog that'd be helpful, and I can't find a PackDir extractor for Solaris at the moment...