Messages

1

IDT Modding Hub / Re: Pyramid Rebirth

« on: November 04, 2018, 05:29:17 pm »

I think they look pretty cool but as you can image, now the inside is different also, that means there is a HEAP of other tiles to change.

Only if you specifically want to hide that yellow stuff, or wanted to make all the wall tiles the same.

The old art was simply made up of the regular UFO hull sprites skewed to fit the pyramid shapes that the map files implied. The original art was never released, and it wouldn't surprise me if even the artist couldn't recall what it looked like, so odds are we'll never know how the ships were supposed to appear.

The "inside" might've been different all along.

ALso i think some will need to be changed as they may handle the basic pyramid but i dont think they are drawn correctly for some of them (  i will check this later tonight).

To my eye they're perfect - all of the orientations have been interpreted correctly.

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IDT Modding Hub / Re: Pyramid Rebirth

« on: August 13, 2014, 09:47:35 am »

Do you know the map tileset of these maps ? (Map03 and Map04)

Sorry to keep you waiting - luke did message me some time ago, but I've been on holiday in Japan.

This should be what you're after. It's very much a mock-up for display purposes, but if you're familiar with map editing (specifically with altering tile properties - these tiles pretty much have none!), I don't think you'll have much trouble doing whatever it is you want to do with it. I suppose the easiest first step would be using something like my MCDAdd tool to rebuild the set properly out of tiles from pre-made terrains (some more info on that here).

In case you're interested, I built it by writing a program that inspected the map files, and built MCD/PCK files according to the types of tiles the maps referenced (floor/wall/etc). Each tile was paired with a "template" image which was basically a flat colour in a generic shape representing whatever each tile was supposed to be. For eg, if the map file treated MCD index 1 as a floor tile, then MCD index 1 got a floor tile image of a random colour. It was then just a matter of replacing the images in the generated PCK with more suitable images from other terrain sets.

Note, however, that the images I selected were my best guesses based on the patterns of the tiles within the map. I've no idea if the maps are really supposed to be covered in snow, for example, and those trees really could've been anything. The walls and staircases are the only aspects where I'd bet money that the graphics are accurate (the pattern of tiles involving the torn wallpaper is the only suitable match).

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Work In Progress / Re: Editing textures.dat

« on: November 23, 2012, 07:16:38 am »

The amount of polygons the original games load is hardcoded, but TFTD loads more then UFO. I converted the UFO textures to TFTD's palette and hauled the map across. I wrote a program to distribute the remaining polys UFO doesn't use in an even grid across the surface of the world to cover the ocean.

I didn't bother trying to line them up with the "ground" polys - those simply sit on top of the "ocean" polys. I suppose you might run into a potential problem with this method in that OpenXcom would need to check which poly missions are going to be performed in, in reverse order to that in which it renders them, for this to work.

Later kyrub found the value in the TFTD EXE that controlled how many polys were loaded, so I was able to crank it way up and make the ocean polys smaller (and hence more numerous, making the globe look a bit smoother).

Anyway, techno-mumbo-jumbo aside, for Mars you'd probably be best off starting with the whole-world-covering-poly-grid first then cutting holes in that to add in the terrain features such as the ice caps or whatever. Easiest way would be to grab the first 648 polys (12,960 bytes) from my combined world map and use them as a starting base, and I'd assume Volutar's editor and my texture converter can help you sort out the rest.

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Work In Progress / Re: Editing textures.dat

« on: November 21, 2012, 01:47:37 am »

Just throwing it out there, but another way to alter the ocean is to simply put textures over it. This is what I did in my ComboMod so that USOs could be shot down anywhere on the globe. The downside, of course, is that you might not want crashsites to appear anywhere on the globe...

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Work In Progress / Re: Editing textures.dat

« on: November 17, 2012, 03:37:37 am »

The "convmisc" tool in my kit deals with them (along with the other less uniform image files in the game).

ConvMisc /toGIF texture

ConvMisc /toGame texture

Run it without parameters to see what else it does. Results are read/written directly from/to the folder where the images are usually stored, you don't need to copy the graphics into the bb_tact folder like you do with PCKs and whatnot.

PCKView doesn't work under anything later then XP. I'm not aware of any workarounds for this.

This page is worth a read if you're not already aware of the reasoning behind the sprite ordering.

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Work In Progress / Re: The Leflair Sprite Sweatshop, Voxels need not apply

« on: October 05, 2012, 05:59:18 pm »

Two files for corpses - FloorOb and BigObs. I'm not strictly sure whether you're wanting to replace sprites or simply tack the new ones onto the end, but either way a patcher can be written to apply single sprites to those two archives so users don't need to deal with it manually. A new corpse object would need to be defined in ObData.dat as well if you want to actually add a new item for them though... And don't get me started on the string tables and UFOpedia side of things...

If it helps, I can generate code to automagically turn your sprite sheet into individual images, or even directly into game files. I'd need a copy of the sprite sheet and info as to exactly what results you wanted.

Must say I'm a fan of the chest-explosion style of death.

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Work In Progress / Re: XCOM HD Propose to redraw all the sprites and increasing they in 4 times

« on: June 03, 2012, 01:26:25 am »

Unfortunately, the 3D shapes the game uses can seldom match the sprites all that well (they're built out of twelve predefined layers of voxels... you don't get to position every voxel yourself). Only really get a good match if the shapes are very simple.

That's not to say that it's a bad idea, just that without using the clumsy shapes pre-defined in the LOF templates the 3D data won't be much use as anything other then a drawing aid... so you might as well go with a more sophisticated modelling system, as for complex objects it's easier to build one model then split it, than it is to make lots of small models and make sure they all mesh together.

Seems to me that if you want high-res art the easiest method would just be to model everything and then convert images of the models directly to sprites, which is more or less what they ended up doing with Apocalypse.

It may also be worth mentioning here that UFO2000 is already packing replacement art, albeit not high-res.

8

Suggestions / Re: burst stop after target destroyed

« on: June 03, 2012, 01:15:11 am »

The whole point of auto-shot is that it's uncontrolled; you pull the trigger three times and hope for the best. The payoff is that you get up to three hits at a reduced TU cost and, rather more importantly, the enemy doesn't get a chance at reaction fire until you're done. I consider that more then an even trade, in fact I use this firing mode near-exclusively because odds are just about always in favour at least one of the shots will hit something at any range.

Though Volutar's point about aliens instantly dropping is valid (even if it'd be quite a game changer to leave them standing), I also use Daiky's tactic of attempting to take out a group of aliens with one auto-shot (just about every time I breach a medium scout for eg).

9

Work In Progress / Re: UFO upgrades

« on: May 19, 2012, 12:33:55 pm »

My art's "jagged", is it? 

Anyway, yes, part of my hopes involve having luke redraw the hull for me. 

Looking good so far, luke. If you want more tiles, seriously, just make another MCD and stick it on the end. You may want to use your custom deer and so on with other maps and it'll make it a lot easier having it in a file on its own... In fact the more you subdivide your sets, the easier it'll be to make more diverse maps in future.

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Work In Progress / Re: Battlescape in high resolution

« on: May 19, 2012, 12:24:34 pm »

I'm not at all confident I'm reading the source correctly, or understand much about how modern rendering engines work, but:

It appears OpenXcom decompresses all sprites at startup then renders the unpacked versions. If so, there's a good chance it could be sped up a fair bit by only storing the packed versions in RAM, then decompressing them directly to the screen each time they are to be rendered.

This is because the packed sprites are stored using RLE, meaning that rendering them this way has the engine entirely skipping most transparent pixels in one leap instead of checking each one to see if it should be rendered or not. I was able to get a significant speed increase in my battlescape editor when I gave up pre-unpacking the sprites, which makes sense when you consider that well over 50% of most of them consists of empty space.

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Work In Progress / Re: UFO upgrades

« on: May 16, 2012, 04:18:54 pm »

I've been sorta intending to throw these into the original - I can think of a way to have BBMod load them in which'd deal with the intercept screen and everything, some of the things it does already are much trickier. The unaccounted-for map codes can be used however you like, this won't affect the game's ability to load them... it's only adding tiles that's ever a problem, but you shouldn't need to do that unless you want to alter the maps (the limit in the original game is 106 tiles total for a UFO).

It doesn't really worry me if you do want to do that. I'd like to see them in as close to their original state as possible, but it's simply not possible to get them 100% anyway short of some dev showing up with the original files. I would prefer to see you adding extra MCDs onto the end of the load order though, rather then trying to add extra tiles into the middle of it, as if you insert tiles then you end up with one set of MCDs that only work with the original maps and one set or MCDs that only work with the altered maps. As opposed to one large set that works with both and one small set that's only needed for the altered maps.

But at the end of the day it really doesn't matter either way, because you still need to distribute custom data to get the things to load with either UFO:EU or OpenXcom - if you're already getting people to download custom MCDs, why not custom maps as well? The file sizes are still tiny, even for the floppy disk age.

Frankly if you want an expanded u_disec1 then your best bet is to just use the u_disec2 that shipped with the actual game... 

SCANG is short for Scanner Graphics. Each tile has an index which points to the overhead map image it should use, same as how each sprite has an index into the PCK table for its regular appearance. Only unlike the PCK list, the SCANG image table is always the same no matter what terrain gets used.

https://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php?title=SCANG.DAT

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Work In Progress / Re: UFO upgrades

« on: May 16, 2012, 02:57:54 pm »

Here's some new MCDs/PCKs. These ones are very nearly perfect - I've filled in some missing blanks with open doors and destroyed tiles (the destroyed tiles might not've been in the original, but hey, why not?), and just about all tiles have correct properties now (only thing really missing is the correct SCANG data for some of the new tiles). That means it's now possible for units to walk through the craft, bullets will interact with them correctly, doors will open and so on.

Load them in the order of: U_EXT01.MCD, U_WALL01.MCD, U_DISEC1.MCD then U_OPER1.MCD. Discard the old "pyra2" mock-up set.

As for the remaining blanks? Use your imagination!    If the tile is currently represented by a question mark, then it truly could be anything. If I've assigned it a numbered sprite, then that means you should look at where that sprite is used in the PHARVEST map, and give it art that suits that location.

A rotated cow was also my thought, but it'll have to be somewhat smaller then the original (which is made up of nine tiles all up, if you include the hanging rods above it).

Keep in mind the seats are used in the PABDUCT and PSCOUT craft too - if you change them to something else in PHARVEST, then you end up changing them to something else in all three maps. If you can think of something more suitable though, then go right ahead, as your guess is as good as mine... Whatever looks good. 

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Work In Progress / Re: UFO upgrades

« on: May 16, 2012, 10:11:45 am »

Well, yes, if you're wanting to make new ships like that then you should be able to mix the MCDs however you like. Perhaps mix the pyramid hulls with the more familiar curved ones, I guess?

I don't intend to be leaving U_PYRA2 as one giant set that represents entire UFOs on its own, though - I'll be splitting it up into smaller sets.

14

Fan-Stuff / Re: old Xcom1 dos music

« on: May 15, 2012, 05:09:56 pm »

Tycho can probably answer any questions you have about those. He goes by Morgan525 on the UFOpedia wiki.

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Work In Progress / Re: UFO upgrades

« on: May 15, 2012, 03:10:30 pm »

These require entirely different MCDs, so they have to be separate from anything compatible with the UFOs we're used to. This is because the MAPs are already written - there's no "tacking new tiles" on the end.

Anyway, if you stick this in your terrain folder, you can tell MapView to use it with the PSCOUT/PABDUCT/PHARVEST maps. If you get it to show the actual MCD data you'll see it's all pretty much the same tile repeated over and over with different art assigned to each copy (I'll build a "proper" MCD tomorrow evening maybe - getting late here right now), but it'll still give you a good idea as to what art is missing.

• Tiles represented by a question mark aren't actually referred to by any of the current maps. Don't bother messing with them unless you want to create new maps of your own based on the pyramid design.
• Red, numbered tiles have no clues as to what they are other then their position on the map and our best guesses.
• The blood basin art comes from U_DISEC2.PCK (though you've probably noticed that U_DISEC2.MCD doesn't use it). That PCK also contains a blue grill tile that's probably supposed to be in the harvester... somewhere.
• It may be that tile 86, which I've set as an empty vat, should be something else. I'm pretty sure all other tiles I've assigned art to are about right. Feel free to re-draw any of them though.

If you look real close you'll spot some tiles that were obviously present to deal with a slightly different rendering engine. For example, if you put a north wall and a south wall within the same tile, the game automatically crops them to avoid a weird graphical overlap effect. It seems at one stage this auto-crop function didn't exist, as these maps have extra wall tiles for this situation which appear to've been pre-cropped.

If you don't know what I mean about the tile cropping, MapView doesn't do it, so that makes it pretty obvious to see what I'm on about. Have MapView show you some UFO base modules and pay attention to where the walls meet - you don't see that problem in these old maps, because they were pre-built not to have it in the first place.

One day I'd really like to build a MCD for MAP3.MAP and MAP4.MAP, which aren't map modules - they're entire battlescapes! They don't use MCDs like any of the other terrains though, and I can't see any solid clues as to what the general appearance of them would've been like (though I know they contain buildings with staircases and elevators). They'd've either been some sort of urban area, or some sort of base.

Edit:

Oh, and I'm not sure whether you're still interested, but my toolkit can deal with InterWin.dat for you (along with pretty much any other image file the game has). I'm not aware of any other tool that will, though as others have mentioned it's a simple format.