DM Reference

DM Ref

icon arithmetic

2 min read

Note

The following “arithmetical” methods of icon manipulation are being phased out in favor of the icon object, which can be directly manipulated and which provides a wider variety of operations. Many of those in turn have been obviated by the color and transform vars.

There are several ways in which icons can be manipulated at runtime. They can be rotated, added together, and the colors components may be altered.

One purpose for such operations is to make players look different. Other interesting uses (and abuses) will undoubtedly follow.

Addition and Subtraction

The result of adding two icons is an arithmetic combination of the color components of each individual pixel. At positions where either icon is transparent, the result is also transparent. Subtraction, instead of increasing the intensity, decreases it by the amount in each pixel of the icon being subtracted.

Suppose you wanted to add together different bodies and heads. You could do that by making a few of each type with black backgrounds. When these add together, the black contributes nothing but prevents pixels in the other icon from getting clipped.

mob/verb
   addicon(I as icon)
      icon += I
   subicon(I as icon)
      icon -= I

If you need to add the same color to every pixel, you can do so using a color value. Color values have the same format as in HTML: “#RRGGBB” with two hexadecimal digits for each color component. That gives you a range in color from 0 to FF (which is 255 in decimal).

You can also specify a color value as “#RGB”. The single digit is automatically repeated, so “#F00” is the same as “#FF0000”, which is bright red. For certain pre-defined color values, you can also specify a name, such as “red”. See HTML colors for a list of color names.

If you prefer base 10, you can create color values with the rgb(R,G,B) instruction. Each parameter is in the range 0 to 255.

Multiplication

To increase (or decrease) the intensity of an icon multiplicatively, you can use the ‘*’ operator.

mob/verb/multicon(factor as num)
   icon *= factor

See also

Graph View