IKEMEN GO: Standalone ADD004 Lifebar - Test 2

In the previous video I said that this lifebar is basically "a tech demo in a controlled environment". The lifebar has only the animations for RoundX, 1 and 2, and K.O. And yet there are problems with the round animations, meaning that what you see here was made using not reliable workarounds. That because at the time of making this video, there are 2 major issues on the engine side that would prevent further work. So until those problems are fixed, be warned if you want to convert this lifebar yourself or perhaps hire someone to do it. So let me explain a little bit about that:

► The first problem would be the combo counter. When it comes to text, there are at least the 3 basic alignment types (left, center and right). ADD004 by CHAD Kakuge uses its own counter, and uses centered alignment for both players. And many commercial games use right alignment for both players. However, in MUGEN we can only align the combo text as follows: P1 to the left and P2 to the right. Plus the counter has a maximum of 3 digits (up to 999 "hits"), with no way to reduce the limit. Unfortunately, IKEMEN GO has the same problem, but with a 4-digit limit (9999 "hits"). Given the context, in the image below you will see why not being able to center the combo counter makes it impossible to use backgrounds (bg/top) for it:
https://imgur.com/E4GL4Fw
You can see that the layers behind the combo text move towards the center as the number of digits increases. This ends up ruining its alignment with the text. So the best thing to do for now is to simply not use these layers. Unfortunately.

► The second problem would be an incomplete feature, which is the multiple layers of round animation. Unlike MUGEN, IKEMEN GO can use multiple layers for rounds. This makes creating these animations much easier, since in the past, more elaborate animations needed to be pre-rendered manually, frame by frame. And this, in addition to taking a lot of time and being a lot of work, also made the SFF file very heavy. The problem here is that, as I said before, it is an incomplete feature. So "roundx" (round1 to round9), "round.single" and "round.final" do not have this feature. How did I bypass this as the video shows? Simple, by using "round.default". The problem is that:
- You are required to have animation for all 9 rounds;
- You cannot use custom effects for the round indicator number, nor for the final round or the message for "round.single";
- The "round" message and other unwanted elements will continue to appear if you want to use "round.single". And even if you have the animations for the 9 rounds, it will be broken after the 10th round (in modes like survival), see the example below:
https://imgur.com/6fblvPF
In 2019, when I converted the TQH0 lifebar, I ended up pre-rendering everything in a single layer, across multiple frames. For now, that's the only solution to deal with this problem. It's very time-consuming, and it's definitely not something I would do again.

Btw, since the original ADD004 was made for MUGEN, the guardbar and healthbar were on a single sprite. But now we can disable the guardbar and stunbar via options, so I went for a modular design.
Shiyo made a version for IKEMEN GO too, but I never took the time to look at it, and since the round animations are different I preferred to stick with the older version because it's nice to update old stuff. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

#ikemengo #igo #engine