Author Topic: Horrific looking UFOpaedia entries /... any tips?  (Read 3741 times)

Offline Wolfstarr

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Horrific looking UFOpaedia entries /... any tips?
« on: October 02, 2016, 02:33:22 am »
So I've been using the photoshop palette in the download section to convert photos / images from the web into ufopaedia articles but everything is looking pretty horrific lol

Does anyone have any tips on pre-conversion treatment of images in order to get the best quality? also does the file type matter when it comes to quality?

I've posted some of my entries (the film buffs among you may recognise some of the aircraft)

Offline robin

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Re: Horrific looking UFOpaedia entries /... any tips?
« Reply #1 on: October 02, 2016, 10:39:59 am »
You have to tweak the original pictures before the conversion, so they are suitable to be converted.
One basic thing you should take care of,  is that the gradients (in the original picture) should only use one color. For example:
light blue to dark blue ---> likely a good result
light purple to dark blue ---> likely a bad result
Also if the basic color is similar to a color present in the palette, this is another step for a good result.

It is impossible to describe a technique to make a picture suitable, since what you have to do is highly dependent on the original picture; and there might also be several methods to achieve the same result.
One overkill but effective technique is to turn the original picture into grayscale, then recolor it using the colors from the palette. This is easy to do in pictures like the one with the B2 bomber, since it is just a gray object on a (ideally) blue sky. Still, a certain amount of tweaking might be involved.

... But of course all of the above make sense if you know how to use photoshop (or gimp). If you don't then you're wasting your time.
In the latter case, you should just search pictures that are suitable from the start: gather a bunch of B2 pictures, convert all of them and keep the one that gives you the better result (I still do this even if I know how to use photoshop, starting from a suitable picture is always better than having to tweak it a lot).
« Last Edit: October 02, 2016, 10:46:50 am by robin »

Offline Meridian

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Re: Horrific looking UFOpaedia entries /... any tips?
« Reply #2 on: October 02, 2016, 11:05:20 am »
You can also try OXCE+ and custom palettes, you'll get much better result: https://openxcom.org/forum/index.php/topic,4957.0.html

Offline Wolfstarr

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Re: Horrific looking UFOpaedia entries /... any tips?
« Reply #3 on: October 02, 2016, 02:28:58 pm »
Thank you all :) I will play around some more using these tips

Offline Wolfstarr

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Re: Horrific looking UFOpaedia entries /... any tips?
« Reply #4 on: October 03, 2016, 03:41:49 am »
So taking this further (and some inspiration from XOps templates) I wondered about emulating the look and feel of the modern XCOM's ufopaedia files in OpenXcom.  A quick flashback to my 16 Bit days reminded my of the startup screen of Mega Man X which had a load of technical data in the intro written in a cool sci-fi font.

I've attached some sample images.  Please excuse how rubbish this looks at the moment I am spending a bit of time experimenting with lots of things as have plenty of ideas!

The wiki mentions about changing the font but I wondered whether this effects the whole game or are you able to specify it to simply impact the UFOpaedia entries? (see below)

Quote
If you want customize font you can make it as mod. During initialization OpenXcom engine searches in Ruleset fontName string, which by default is Font.dat. You can redefine this string to another file, for example MyFont.dat, and replace some image strings to your *.png-files.

Just remember, *.dat file should be placed in Language folder, and *.png files are searched relative to *.dat file!
« Last Edit: October 03, 2016, 03:46:35 am by SideQuests »