Vanilla Sprite "Extraction" Question

[Orz]

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.

[Dioxine]

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.

They won't look at all. If you use stock sprites, you will have a normal Calcinite's death animation then the Silacoid will instantly appear.

[Eddie]

Well, i used the method described in this post here:
https://openxcom.org/forum/index.php/topic,2980.0.html

And you can easily turn the silacoid green by inverting the color. I did that using Paint.NET, but as stated also in the tools section, paint is not good because it screws up the palette. So the attached picture is just proof of concept and should not be used. Just need to get around installing some other grafic program to do the inversion with and then it should work fine.

[Arthanor]

I cannot recommend enough Falko's tool. I have done all of my modding with them and they work GREAT! Simple and dependable to get the job done.

Here's an example sprite recolored using TftD's depth1 palette to show how it could look under shallow water. And the raw sprite so you can play around in Falko's palette converter by yourself. Don't forget to get the corpse floor and big object and recolor them as well.

Enjoy!

[Orz]

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.

[Arthanor]

Falko's stuff is the perfect thing to do rough color swaps on sprites like for that celatid. Another thing I really like with it is that, if you use the proper RGB colors in another editor (like paint.. yup, I'm super technological too) and save a RBG png, you can fix the picture so it uses the proper palette using that tool as well.

[Orz]

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

[Arthanor]

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

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.

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.

Hope that helps!

[pWWWa]

to Orz, What about PhotoShop ?

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

Tiny mod with your wishes:
- Dead Calcinite spawn Plasmicide (Gray&Green Silacoid with Deep One weapon);
- Plasmicide research open Calcinite BioScreen, Corpse - Calcinite`s autopsy;
- Plasmicide corpse unlocks Vibroblade.

Update:
- Plasmicide corpse is really unlock Vibro_Blade now (shame on me);
- Added Green/Blue Plasmicide Graphic (Old exists in subfolder).

[Orz]

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!

[Xeno Wiper]

to Orz, What about PhotoShop ?Tiny mod with your wishes:
- Dead Calcinite spawn Plasmicide (Gray&Green Silacoid with Deep One weapon);
- Plasmicide research open Calcinite BioScreen, Corpse - Calcinite`s autopsy;
- Plasmicide corpse unlocks Vibroblade.

Update:
- Plasmicide corpse is really unlock Vibro_Blade now (shame on me);
- Added Green/Blue Plasmicide Graphic (Old exists in subfolder).

pWWWa owning the thread... And the gif as a coupe de grace. Nice job!