Author Topic: making an hwp replacement  (Read 4854 times)

Offline RSSwizard

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making an hwp replacement
« on: April 07, 2017, 07:41:27 am »
porting the coelecanth and displacer over to ufo/piratez as replacements for the (goofy and duckbill looking) original tanks. Recolored now it looks like both are made of plastasteel. I figured out how to relocate all the image pieces just fine (took me about 3 hours but I finished that).

The only problem is the turrets, I cant get them right on their vertical alignment for some reason.

The coelecanth may not be animated but I consider the "treads" to actually be tread covers to protect the treads, it works either way, if I care to modify it much ill put a spraypainted anarchy symbol on the "glass bubble" and a more homogenous cover for the treads.

Offline Solarius Scorch

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Re: making an hwp replacement
« Reply #1 on: April 07, 2017, 05:03:25 pm »
I admit I like these colours.

Offline RSSwizard

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Re: making an hwp replacement
« Reply #2 on: April 07, 2017, 10:46:46 pm »
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!)

-----

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.


------
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.
« Last Edit: April 07, 2017, 10:54:39 pm by RSSwizard »

Offline RSSwizard

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Re: making an hwp replacement
« Reply #3 on: April 08, 2017, 02:44:54 am »
This should just about do it, the only turret I havent adapted is the Hovertank/Double Rocket. This -should- work as it stands ill just have to modify the resource definition for it to accommodate the different image resolution.

Offline RSSwizard

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Re: making an hwp replacement
« Reply #4 on: April 08, 2017, 04:35:40 am »
Its still giving me the not-enough-frames error and I just dont understand whats going on with it.

Code: [Select]
[07-04-2017_20-32-15] [FATAL] A fatal error has occurred: Invlid surface set 'TFTDTANKS.PCK' for armor 'TANK_ARMOR': not enough frames
The ruleset configurations are rather simple:

Code: [Select]
# this is in extraSprites
  - type: TFTDTANKS.PCK
    width: 256
    height: 1640
    subX: 32
    subY: 40
    files:
      0: Resources/TFTD_TANKS.png

# this is in armors
  - type: TANK_ARMOR
    spriteSheet: TFTDTANKS.PCK
    drawingRoutine: 11

Offline RSSwizard

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Re: making an hwp replacement
« Reply #5 on: April 10, 2017, 07:45:58 am »
While I hit a little snag and decided to go more original with tank design I also managed to do something ive been wanting to do for a real long time, this would work for a vanilla replacement just fine IMO.

Meet the Mini Scout (Small Scout ship turned into a 2x2 cyberdisc). Beware the purple.

Offline RSSwizard

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Re: making an hwp replacement
« Reply #6 on: April 17, 2017, 12:35:28 am »
And Voila after some work and procrastination a modified military green colored Tank that looks beefier, and a hovertank+turret that im comfortable with.

Edit: some positioning was off but its no biggie, modified the files. It looks dangerous. Blue plastic late 90s style science fiction movie hovertank included.
« Last Edit: April 17, 2017, 01:34:27 am by RSSwizard »

Offline Zharkov

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Re: making an hwp replacement
« Reply #7 on: August 14, 2017, 10:55:34 am »
Its still giving me the not-enough-frames error and I just dont understand whats going on with it.

Code: [Select]
[07-04-2017_20-32-15] [FATAL] A fatal error has occurred: Invlid surface set 'TFTDTANKS.PCK' for armor 'TANK_ARMOR': not enough frames

 I am getting this, too. So, how did you solve this problem?
« Last Edit: August 14, 2017, 10:59:36 am by Zharkov »