Ship Size Images Issue

[Igard]

ORIGINAL: ehsumrell1

Igard, I'll put a bug in Elliot's ear on this issue again. Can't say anything more at this time
but could be doable.
[:)]

Thanks Ed! [8D]

[RavenX]

ORIGINAL: Igard

DauntlessK, unless something was changed since my previous tests, all 5 of those will come out at the same size. Really sorry I didn't mention that in my earlier post. The game will ignore the outer transparent pixels and only render from the perimeter of the opaque ones. Really annoying, I know, but that's what it does for some reason.

You can see for yourself in the post from a few years ago that Elliot didn't have a solution for us, only that he would consider implementing some way to change it in the future. I'm pretty sure that he's still aware of it, but it's probably not a priority for him with Shadows in development.

I've nagged on and off for over 2 years about this. Really hope someone can find a solution, but the conclusion we made in that old post was that Elliot must make a change to the way the game renders ships, or add something extra in the mod tools.

Igard, I know that response was to Dauntless but it brought a question to my mind. Wasn't LordXorn able to make bigger ships but there was just something off with the way the shields looked when the ship was hit? If this is so maybe we could live with the trade off. I wouldn't mind if it looked a little odd when the ship got shot at since I don't imagine the universe in a game would be filled with nothing but Death Stars and Borg Cubes. They'd only be a small fraction of them in game compared to the total number of ships so I could live with the trade off being able to make bigger looking ships even if they do look a little funny when they take damage.

ORIGINAL: ehsumrell1

@RavenX, I was working on a 'Multiverse' mod compilation also before Shadows hit the board. Would
love to collaborate with you (mostly for the Character work involved) once Shadows is done and
I'm released from the NDA. Then mods can be adapted/created for Shadows.
[8D]

Sounds like a plan to me brother . I have no idea what kinds of updates it would take to make my upcoming theme compatible with Shadows as we don't have any information on that yet but I'm sure we can cross that bridge when the time comes.

What kind of "Character work" did you have in mind? Do you mean specific pictures for the characters in each race? Aside from adding specific Leader Only pictures for the races/factions I'd like to include in my theme I can't think of much "Character Work" that would need to be done. Also don't forget my real modding strength are in doing graphics and images, not coding. Aside from some minor XML or Text Editing my scripting skills are practically non-existent.

I just want to add all my favorite Sci-Fi races to my theme and have them have Leader/Race portraits and of course Ships that match their race from whatever Sci-Fi they are from. I'm fine with emulating how the races act within the confines of what DW:Legends does already, that way it's easier to balance out the races. That way if we include both the Cylons from BSG and the Borg from Star Trek they don't end up dominating every game they happen to be in.

Speaking of the Borg, I own Star Trek Armada 1&2 so getting all the Borg Ship images shouldn't be a problem as IIRC they all appear from the top down anyway so it should be a simple matter for me to pull the ship images from the game and convert them over to PNG's for use in DW.

[Igard]

ORIGINAL: RavenX

Igard, I know that response was to Dauntless but it brought a question to my mind. Wasn't LordXorn able to make bigger ships but there was just something off with the way the shields looked when the ship was hit? If this is so maybe we could live with the trade off. I wouldn't mind if it looked a little odd when the ship got shot at since I don't imagine the universe in a game would be filled with nothing but Death Stars and Borg Cubes. They'd only be a small fraction of them in game compared to the total number of ships so I could live with the trade off being able to make bigger looking ships even if they do look a little funny when they take damage.

Lordxorn was able to make his ships look smaller. It was the Nebulon B Frigates from Star Wars. They're very thin, which meant that they rendered very large in-game. Even larger than the star destroyers. We got round this problem by adding more transparent pixels to the Nebulon image. Using black, lowest transparency pixels replacing the fully transparent pixels allowed him to fine-tune the size of the ship. The drawback was the damage textures would display over these semi-transparent pixels, which looked odd.

It's a shame his images went down. They illustrated what was going on much better.

[RavenX]

ORIGINAL: Igard

Lordxorn was able to make his ships look smaller. It was the Nebulon B Frigates from Star Wars. They're very thin, which meant that they rendered very large in-game. Even larger than the star destroyers. We got round this problem by adding more transparent pixels to the Nebulon image. Using black, lowest transparency pixels replacing the fully transparent pixels allowed him to fine-tune the size of the ship. The drawback was the damage textures would display over these semi-transparent pixels, which looked odd.

It's a shame his images went down. They illustrated what was going on much better.

Ahh, so that trick would only work for making ships smaller then? I did manage to find most of his (at least I they're his) shipImages. I haven't opened them in Photoshop yet though to check them out as I haven't actually done anything with my theme yet aside from yank resources I wanted out of other mods. I still need to put them together into one theme. I'm in the middle of a great game of DW:Extended atm though and I'd like to finish it first, then start modifying it to make my own theme with all the races and ship images I've found so far.

[ehsumrell1]

ORIGINAL: RavenX

ORIGINAL: ehsumrell1

@RavenX, I was working on a 'Multiverse' mod compilation also before Shadows hit the board. Would
love to collaborate with you (mostly for the Character work involved) once Shadows is done and
I'm released from the NDA. Then mods can be adapted/created for Shadows.
[8D]

Sounds like a plan to me brother . I have no idea what kinds of updates it would take to make my upcoming theme compatible with Shadows as we don't have any information on that yet but I'm sure we can cross that bridge when the time comes.

What kind of "Character work" did you have in mind? Do you mean specific pictures for the characters in each race? Aside from adding specific Leader Only pictures for the races/factions I'd like to include in my theme I can't think of much "Character Work" that would need to be done. Also don't forget my real modding strength are in doing graphics and images, not coding. Aside from some minor XML or Text Editing my scripting skills are practically non-existent.

You can have more than just 'Leader' characters for each race. I can do characters for Admirals, Ambassadors,
Agents, etc. In Igard's Star Trek Picard Mod we had 500 Star Trek characters (game limit at that time, but we
didn't use a lot of them) for the various races and titles. It's some work, but it really makes the mod stand out. Especially for immersion and re-playability. Each also has their own traits and skills level.

[Igard]

ORIGINAL: RavenX
Ahh, so that trick would only work for making ships smaller then? I did manage to find most of his (at least I they're his) shipImages. I haven't opened them in Photoshop yet though to check them out as I haven't actually done anything with my theme yet aside from yank resources I wanted out of other mods. I still need to put them together into one theme. I'm in the middle of a great game of DW:Extended atm though and I'd like to finish it first, then start modifying it to make my own theme with all the races and ship images I've found so far.

I think the Nebulon B frigate might have been the only ship where he used that trick. It should be the empire's destroyer.png, you should see a faint transparent area around the ship.