Reg

How were you doing it before, "Magic Wand" in an external program and then importing ?

Yes, that would have to be a manual fix. But the power of MFME and that tool does so much for you I hope it'll be ok.

Hi Bruce, I am well, hope your good too. That was fixed in MFME, but might not always be possible due to how layouts are done. Go into DX Lamp Creator and click on Re Mask Images that does it in the case of your layout shown here. Give it a shot on yours and you'll see it working. Cheers.

Note that this tip follows on from the one linked below, but needs mentioning as it has an effect on the game if you use a mouse. It is also good practice to get this right on the buttons ( as well as all the other lamps ). I have taken a recent look at a layout from @BruceGeorge after a problem with clicking with the mouse on the Start button. The problem was that the button would not always function on clicking when using a mouse. Taking a look at the layout in design mode, it has shown the reason is simply - too much transparency has been used. Here is the button in question... ...it should not have all that grey in between the features and this also goes for all lamps. Transparency within lamps causes two problems. Adjusting the brightness of the background and re-lamping does not work correctly. MFME will not click if using the mouse on the transparent areas of a button. The fix is easy, ensure that your lamps are correctly masked for all lamps and buttons. The above example should have really been looking like this... ...this is not going to be fixed on layouts that have been released so if you are suffering from this problem, ensure that you tick the Click All box as shown here. ...this means that the areas shown in red which are broken due to the over use of transparency will work fine. This should only be used as a fix for current layouts, not a fix to avoid doing things correctly in the future. Remember this applies to all lamps and if you do not, the following does not work correctly. Adjusting the brightness of the background and re-lamping does not work correctly. MFME will not click if using the mouse on the transparent areas of a button. This is something that will be looked at in future reviews just to keep you on your toes! However in some cases it might be possible to use the power of MFME to fix this for some legacy layouts. On a backup to make sure you don't alter your original if you are not happy, go into DX Lamp Creator and click on Re Mask Images... ...the broken Start button now looks like this. ...MFME can save you some of the time, but please use best practices by ensuring it's right on release.

I can see what you are saying, it does seem close, it's an insane observation but my god, you are right !

...ha! Very good. I am on the lookout now - I assume you mean the original Electrocoin, not the BFM version ?

I don't have an Electrocoin Hi-Tech roms !

Spot on, with the addition of I also changed the brightness of the "on lamps" using the second window. The mask for the lamps using a "slightly off yellow" colour add the icing to the cake in this instance. No graphical work was done "behind the scenes" on this one, it was all with the tool described and masks.

Thank you ! This is all thanks to @Wizard and his toolset for MFME. The intersting thing is, people may not have known you can do this but you have the power with a combination of this and lamps to really mess with layouts and what they look like with ease. Here is one more that I've just been looking at. I've also used a non-defalt mask for all the lamps as well... THE ORIGINAL AN UPDATED VERSION

Here is an example of Monopoly Club. I had to manually fix a lot of lamps on this for this to work but this is a legacy ( and great layout ), so worth the time and effort. THE ORIGINAL A DARKENED VERSION

MFME has a great feature to lamp masks with ease. The best way to show this is we take an original layout as shown here... ...we are going to convert this in a few moments to this. Note that this layout above is NOT USING LAMP MASKS and this means that if we adjust the background contrast and brightness, you end up with an effect like this. This is wholesale wrong and just terrible... ...take a look at the ugly boxing this creates around buttons and lamps. Not nice for the eyes. This is because lamp masking has not been done correctly. To fix this, go into edit mode and select Design / DX Lamp Creator. Type the values you see in Min Pixel Diff and Min ON Pixel Value. Be sure to type these, even if it's already populated. Then click on Re Mask Images and your layout is correctly masked and the altered background is now fixed. You will have to fix overlays yourself by hand, I have not done it on the above example but you'll see everything is perfectly lamped now. Here is an example of what it is doing, before and after... There might sometimes be an odd lamp you need to fix yourself, after all, this is doing an automated task but the success rate is extremely high.

No mate ! Got a lot going on in real life at the moment and more importantly, although the reviews are radomly picked, the main key is really where there is something I can add to a layout or it is a game that I've not seen before. I am trying to not jump in and rip things apart - it's not positive and helps nobody. So your Snail Blazer is on the list as I've never seen that one before. A lot of effort goes into the reviews as well, they're not done and dusted in five minutes. With regards to the unsaid point about busy in real life but I am still releasing, remember that these are pretty much done stuff and I usaully only spend five minutes fixing anything that needs updating ( reel bounce etc ) and the next few mins doing the flyer. There was always the submission question from elsewhere on this site. If somebody wants a layout reviewed, they can always ask. I am just a bit mindfull that the scene is fairly small and I don't want to piss of the few designers we have. This site is a really good measure of live members, look at how many people have registered ( most purely to get a download ) which is sub-200. We're a tight knit community and until it expands best I don't upset too many people... ...but my friend... ...one of your layouts was honestly on the list. But it will be done when I have time to do the proper effort rather then a rush job which is an insult in itself to a designer.