Messages

46

Released Mods / Re: [FULL MOD] UFO & TFTD Rework (latest update: March 1)

« on: March 01, 2016, 10:07:35 pm »

Kinda like the Tasoth colour, but it's too much like USO walls, plus the yellow spots don't work for me.

Glad you noticed. Not without reason did I choose to take a snapshot inside a USO and put a Tasoth right next to a wall: there is that unintended but surprising chameleon-like side effect, and I kinda liked how it turned out (is it really a bad thing?). As for the yellow spots, yes, I'm still considering removing them. They bothered me a bit at first, but not so much after playing a full match against a Tasoth crew so I left them in out of sheer indecisiveness.

47

Open Feedback / Re: Female Head/Hair Sprite issue (Enhanced soldier sprites)

« on: March 01, 2016, 09:55:18 pm »

One caveat original sprites are rewritten on load to fix multiple bugs in them and simplify recoloring.
In your graphic male and female have different hair colors, male work because it have same as in ruleset defined:

Code: [Select]

    spriteHairGroup: 4This value mean that index from 4*16 to 5*16-1 are replaced by new color.

Alright! So what's the solution?

48

Open Feedback / Re: Female Head/Hair Sprite issue (Enhanced soldier sprites)

« on: March 01, 2016, 06:07:43 pm »

Have you changed the hair color on the spritesheet?

Nope.

49

Open Feedback / Re: Female Head/Hair Sprite issue (Enhanced soldier sprites)

« on: March 01, 2016, 05:43:40 pm »

You need to copy this...

Thanks, I had already tried that and (unless I'm missing something!) it still doesn't work. Blondes still be blonde

50

Open Feedback / Female Head/Hair Sprite issue (Enhanced soldier sprites) *Resolved*

« on: March 01, 2016, 04:19:47 pm »

So I've modified Aqua Plastic Armor and Mag. Ion Armor spritesheets (first for better color scheme and second to add orange "grav-pack" on land). I couldn't fail to notice that all female head/hair sprites default to blonde as if the "Enhanced soldier sprites" options specifically didn't apply to them. Please do note that male heads/hairs still display correctly (all 4 variations of them on both modified versions of Plastic And Ion Armors), so this is some sort of bug or coding issue specific to female sprites.

"Enhanced soldier sprites" works fine on vanilla spritesheets. For illustration purposes only, this is what female heads/hair sprites should look like (in Diving Suit here):



And no, I have specifically made sure I didn't touch head/hair colors when modifying the armors themselves.

Fix?

51

Troubleshooting / Re: Soldier sprites incorrectly drawn

« on: March 01, 2016, 04:07:52 pm »

I was also going to bring this up, coincidentally.

52

Released Mods / Re: [FULL MOD] Illamasqua's UFO & TFTD Rework (last upd. Feb 18)

« on: March 01, 2016, 03:41:43 pm »

NEW UPDATE WITH SOME PICS
(download links in OP, as usual)

Reverted Plastic Aqua Armor to vanilla with some minor fixes in the white coloring of the armor plates (I would prefer to settle for full snow-white Aqua Armor as shown in an earlier post, but can't manage to make inventory sprites look good all in white yet). Just so that we're on the same page here: the only reason why I'm trying to re-color Aqua Armor is too more easily differentiate it from Diving Suit.

Also below is Coela/Gauss with a new color style (tried different variations but only yellow or white seem to fit the TFTD feel):



Color fix from light creamy yellow/brown armor plates to white + blue helmet matching rest of suit:



And new Tasoth reskin (reasons: too much yellow overload with all the Lobsters and Ion Armors end-game). Now they look lite pretty little seahorses



Also added Lobsterman Tomb Guard to final T'leth level only, just to spiff things up. Tried lots of color variations (including ghostly bluish-green which looks pretty menacing) but decided to play it safe and stick to a darker/red lobster (with changed eye color) for now. Below both regular Lobster and red one for comparison. Also showing Calcinite's "Protoform" too:



For full changelog details go HERE.

And feel free to share your thoughts: feedback/criticism is appreciated

PS: I am kind of working on and off on TFTD's 5th alien race based on a modified version of one of Dioxine's priests (mentioned in an earlier post) in combination with Solarius' Cthulhu-themed sorcerer, but that might take another while.

Have you ditched that dark green plastic? Was it still similar with diving?

I used your fixed Diving Suit bigOb.

Was that black helmet based on its own inv dolls img?

That was the original idea, but now it's changed again.

53

Released Mods / Re: [FULL MOD] Illamasqua's UFO & TFTD Rework (last upd. Feb 18)

« on: February 20, 2016, 04:41:23 pm »

You know, I was looking at the rulesets, and I was thinking that I like the idea of making sonic/plasma the ones without ammo limits (although with higher encumberance. and possibly no autofire/worse accuracy), instead of laser/gauss. It kind of makes sense that the more useful guns appear later on...

That's exactly what I had originally done. It might be brought up in the future, but ultimately, the reason why it was changed back was because I begun to miss the reloading feel of all weapons. Don't know, it somehow made them feel more "tangible" and "personal." Plus, I was getting the same feedback from a couple other users here. Laser, however, definitely needed to be just like Gauss. 

Tentative new reskin of Plastic Aqua Armor for next update. Literally tried dozens of recolors and dark blue/musky green doesn't look good. Black and white were the last two remaining candidates. I wanted to go with white since I felt it would fit TFTD's "swimming pool party with plastic water guns" style better, and I was very leery of black, but black seems to better match the inventory sprites (and not even I can deny those glossy, obsidian-looking black helmets sure look sleek!):





ADDENDUM

Also: Torpedo Launcher restyle. Now each torpedo has more of a "unique" feel to it, like UFO/EU. (May miniaturize Small Torpedo alongside Small Rocket later, but it's good for now.)

54

Work In Progress / Re: Vanilla Sprite "Extraction" Question

« on: February 18, 2016, 11:16:37 pm »

Falk also has a sprite chopper who will give you all the pictures in a pck as pngs in a zip file. Very handy!

Indeed!

As for palettes, my guess is that when you chopped the image in paint, you saved it with a white background instead of a transparent one. Falko's tool recognized the white and assigned that color instead of transparent.

This is exactly what happened. I've learned the lesson.

Lastly, for the silacoid colors, I made a palette conversion which starts from the ufo battle palette and converts to the TftD depth1 palette, but I also switched some row assignments around in the TftD palette so the purple and pink were assigned to greens.

I was switching rows totally the wrong way! Or rather, I didn't even realize I wasn't doing anything by just clearing rows on the middle palette rather than the ones on the sides Still, can't completely make sense of what colors to switch off and which ones to leave on to get what I want. Must experiment further.

Tiny mod with your wishes:

Thanks for taking the time to put that together!

55

Released Mods / Re: [FULL MOD] Illamasqua's UFO & TFTD Rework (last upd. Feb 16)

« on: February 18, 2016, 10:48:49 pm »

Any future plans for adding some more variety in terms of weapons and the like?
Thanks for sharing.

Hmm, not in terms of new weapons, don't think. I wanted to keep the vanilla feel as much as possible. If anything, the aliens deserve a little more weapon variety, but those additions can't break the game balance either. The thing with adding new weapons is that they often render some of the old ones pretty useless (imbalance). Given the choice, I would rather prefer if everything had at least some utility/niche/specialty.

Other little changes and improvements should probably be added as time goes on, but for the most part (and for the time being), it's all pretty much done. What TFTD is still sorely lacking is a Cthulhu-themed end-game race, and that's the "major" thing missing. Other than that, definitely more SUB variations as well as the still-pending alternate Coelacanth/Gauss re-color to go along with Tank/Laser, but that's about it in terms of big additions. (OK, maybe add Caclinite's "protoplasm" spawn unit upon death too, but that's kinda under development/testing at the moment.) Oh, and of course: HQ Sounds like UFO/EU!

Speaking of missing stuff, this thread could use some pics:

Mag. Ion Armor flying on land (land spritesheet was previously missing orange "grav-pack" on land):



New corpse sprites for Diving Suit and Plastic Aqua Armor (vanilla sprites were all white with mismatching gloves/boots):



"Conventional" Family line (new Pistol sprite):



Laser Family line (new Pistol & Rifle sprite as well as matching colors):



Plasma Family line (new Pistol sprite as well as matching colors):



And Calcinite's tentative "protoform" showcase:



ADDENDUM
Also, how about a Deep One reskin? They always looked so dull and boring in their usual "grey" tone. Well, now they look like Smurfs!



TFTD mod just updated, BTW.

PS: Also, just 'tween you and I—don't tell anybody—but difficulty for beginner/experienced levels increased slightly. Just Aim & Armor multipliers, though. I mean, 0.5/1.0 for UFO/EU and 0.4/0.7 for TFTD was too much a handicap for the aliens. Them poor guys can barely hit a thing and get killed almost with lousy Pistols even! 0.8/0.9 seemed more fair

56

Work In Progress / Re: Vanilla Sprite "Extraction" Question

« on: February 17, 2016, 12:15:15 am »

OK, couple quick questions which require no immediate answer:

I convert PCK/TAB files into PNG. So far so good. Now, the thing with floorobs and bigobs (from vanilla UFO/EU) is that they come all together in one file. So I have to cut them out using Paint (yeah, me too; either that or Paint.NET), right? I know they have to be in the right pixel proportions, that's no prob. I then convert them back once again using Falco's tool so that they don't get the colors messed up. I even add them to the game just fine. The problem is they (corpse sprites) still have that white background in-game. That's issue number one.

Second question/issue is: I can't make any sense of the color palettes! I mean, how the hell did you even get that color on the blue Silacoid? I tried all TFTD depths and even tried customizing palettes (and utterly failed at that, it seems!): they always come up a completely different color in-game!

Except your blue Silacoid shows up with those exact colors just fine.

So here I am, genuinely flabbergasted at what's probably a rather simple thing to understand once you figure it out

57

Work In Progress / Re: Vanilla Sprite "Extraction" Question

« on: February 16, 2016, 08:22:19 pm »

Thanks a lot! Will definitely need to play around with that a bit more. All I'm (minimally) good at right now is using EvilPixie to make small sprite changes here and there. I'll definitely need to check out Falko's tool a bit more thoroughly when I get some time.

58

Work In Progress / Vanilla Sprite "Extraction" Question

« on: February 14, 2016, 10:25:52 pm »

Basically, I was/am thinking of having Calcinite spawn its amorphous mass of protoplasmic entrails upon death by using Silacoid's sprite in its place (which, since I don't use it for my UFO/EU mod, I figured I'd just put it to good use here). The spawned blob would then get a ranged acid (TFTD electric, but whatever) attack to compensate for Calcinite's previous melee-only limitations while in the suit.

The coding is fairly simple (use Zombie as template), I am just at a loss when it comes to adding Silacoid to the extraSprites ruleset because I really have no idea where to get it from or how to "extract" it. I mean, I know there's a SILACOID.PCK and TAB file in UFO's UNIT folder, but I don't know what to do with it or if that's all I need. I thought it wouldn't be so hard since Silacoid's sprites have already been created and it'd be just a matter of implementation.

So how hard would it be?



PS: Yes, there'd be a color mismatch between purplish Silacoid and greenish Calcinite (autopsy image), but we could just say it looks green behind the container's tinted glass Plus, there's already other color mismatches in TFTD anyway, it's part of the charm!

PPS: I don't know how the transitional "missing frames" between Calcinite's death and Silacoid's spawning would look, but this is just all testing anyway.

59

Open Feedback / Re: Alien's dual weapon wielding? (AI question)

« on: February 14, 2016, 10:04:44 pm »

don't take dioxine's word as gospel, that part about the belt in particular is nonsense, and the whole faster snapshot thing only pertains to reaction fire.

the main reason they weren't using the blaster launcher effectively (if at all) was due to a pathfinding bug, which has been fixed.

Wonderful. Just last night I was doing Sigsbee (T'leth pt. 1) and was surprised to see a couple good uses of DPL already! How they managed to make all those sharp turns (like zing, zing, zing, zing, zing!) in such a tight and narrow environment made my day. Granted, a Tasoth blasted itself with DPL in the following mission, but at least he took 2 aquanauts with him in the process. I'd like to think that the AI did that on purpose

60

Open Feedback / Re: Alien's dual weapon wielding? (AI question)

« on: February 07, 2016, 02:20:35 am »

It will always use the weapon with fastest Snap Shot, all else be damned.

Well, that sucks! So much for my attempt at giving the aliens more offensive versatility 

It would also seem that they'd very much prefer to use Alien Grenades and even Psi-Attacks over Blaster Launchers, almost as if they are deliberately shying away from using the BMG! I guess this was the reason why those aliens in vanilla who *did* use Blaster Launcher were limited to just that one single weapon (no Grenades) and, in many cases, high-ranking aliens (who'd be Psi-Skilled) were given Rifles or Heavies instead.

It's really sad, so much potential wasted.