I admit I like these colours.
Thanks, I'd noticed that dioxine had done some marvelous things with blues and ports of tftd objects to ufo palette that looked pretty dang nice. So my estimation was correct that I could get navy blue to look good. The Displacer looks almost identical to the way it would in the underwater tftd palette.
Its just a personal mod but these vehicles look alot more intimidating and dangerous to me than the enemy unknown tanks, especially since ive only seen the hovertank levied against me and replacing that with the Displacer is gonna make it look as nasty as a flying sectopod. The only thing id change about the coelecanth is getting rid of its bubble viewport since it no longer fits, but for now its fine the way it is (the rear wheels have spikes sticking off of them!)
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I think I figured out the problem but I havent fixed it yet...
I borrowed these from llamasqua's tftd rework since he had the vanilla one in his resource pile. For some reason my computer cant run the ripping utilities for xcom files, and before you say it ive already tried the online tools and those arent working for me either (it just keeps asking me to upload a file, or I click on it to convert and it does nothing). But the tftd rework that llamasqua did had the as-close-to-vanilla versions as possible so I just used that.
But I did some closer examination and there is a difference in that xcom1 tanks are drawn with DrawingRoutine: 2 while the xcom2 tanks are drawn with DrawingRoutine: 11. I never paid much attention to this property because there wasnt any documentation about it.
But I can just logically estimate that Routine 11 works to make Coelecanth/Displacer operate like they regularly do, and Routine 2 makes the enemy unknown Tank/Hovertank work like it does. And that includes the positions of the turrets I guess. I really dont think the program being pointed to a specifically named .PCK is going to change its behavior and this is the only factor that appears to be different.
In TFTD with the exact same (within-tile) alignments they look right, but under Xcom1 they're a good 10-12 pixels too low. And they dont have an existing modifier to say "
hey this is where you're supposed to draw the turret, kthxbye".
So this branched off into more than just a simple graphic replacement - into peeling the tank entities out of piratez.rul and adding them to my own mod just so that I could give them DrawingRoutine: 11
Crash Error comes up when I go to view the tank on the 2nd floor of my deliverator: there arent enough frames in the tanks graphic to cover it.
Then I realized something else that comes along with the Coelecanth/Displacer and thats each one also had 4 animation frames too.
So the answer to this is ill probably just load back up that original resource image and reperform all the color modifications to it, and then im going to have to expand it to fill in all the extra turrets that Dioxine added (big cannon, gauss, hovertank with missiles)
It does give me another chance to possibly do some other tweaks on the turrets or even do a mutant splice of the TFTD style coelecanth and displacer turrets, it could end up looking pretty radical but im going to have to just get it working properly before I get around to that.
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as for color editing thats actually pretty easy, in photoshop (I use 7) I convert the graphics to 24 bit then select areas I want to modify colors on (or rather deselect areas I dont want to touch) and then I start playing around with Hue/Saturation and Curves.
When im done, convert back to 8bit using the UFO palette and see how good the colors match, if it doesnt i just go back and tweak colors abit more until they fit, or I leave it like it is and do some manual editing.
If any manual adjustments need to be done its not that hard to get the paint bucket after them (turn off "contiguous") because that works in 8bit mode and it hits all the pixels that converted to a certain color no matter where they are, within the selected area. Because there's probably not that many colors that would be off kilter, any troublesome shades can be attended to
The only involved manual editing I had to do to the coelcanth was painting its headlights yellow, which im going to have to do again but its no biggie.
Problem with photoshop is its native assumption of people using 24 bit so it doesnt have an 8 bit color picker even when you're working with 8 bit images, but if I approximate what color I know is on the palette itll paint that anyway.
And to be honest the Turrets need a little bit more color tweaking as they stand, and im going to have to keep in mind what kinds of colors will clash or work with the existing navy blue scheme. The turrets need to look different than the tank body and the special ones that you've got to do alot of research to get access to need to look fancy as a reward (that teal version for the railgun looks sublime). Cant look too civilian and non-piratey, im thinking I might go with Faded Red + Orange because that looks pretty piratey.
