Newb questions on Mod Making.

[ClockworkIndustries]

*is new* Hi guys.

I've followed Spring for a year or two, played Kernel Panic quite a bit, and finally decided to join. Before I joined, I tried to make a small mod. However, the resident tutorials are not particuarly helpful, apart from http://spring.clan-sy.com/phpbb/viewtop ... 14&t=13034 and http://spring.clan-sy.com/phpbb/viewtop ... g+tutorial. The current tutorials don't seem to support the latest Spring files, which are sd7 files whilst the current tutorials either refer to old versions with lots of folders or are half-finished. Scriptor doesn't even seem to exist, and all this business is confusing me.

So, two questions:

• Is there a pack for all the elements needed for mod making, e.g Wings 3d, GIMP/Paint.net, etc? If not, could someone point me towrds Scriptor or other scripting/animation programs?
• Likewise, do you think there should be a general tutorial for complete newbs to ease them in? This could open the floodgates for 16 million posts of identical, badly textured tanks and bad grammar, but the current tutorials are too fragmented and rely on too much beforehand knowledge for my liking. *read: I rely too much on tutorials *

Thanks for providing a great engine/game, and thanks in advance for any responses.

[Gnomre]

I don't know if there are any other mirrors for Scriptor besides FU (which is down), so I uploaded it a few days ago for someone else:

http://spring.gnomre.net/tools/scriptor.zip
Also make sure you have the Euler angles version of Upspring: http://spring.gnomre.net/tools/Upspring ... Angles.exe

If you need to set the constants, use 182.044449 for angular and 65536 for linear, unless you're going to be editing *A scripts, in which case you should probably use 163840 for linear (IIRC). I don't know which, if any, *A mods have corrected their linear values. But if you're making your own scripts from scratch, definitely use 65536 so your linear values match up with those in Upspring.

BTW, in terms of animating for spring, you pretty much have to do it by manipulating a piece in upspring, noting the values, and applying speeds to these changes. The animation suite in Upspring at best gives you completely fucked up scripts, and at worst it just gives you a bunch of move piece to 0 lines. I don't think anyone's actually finished any kind of exporter for blender or any other program.

As for the whole sdd/sdz/sd7 thing, here's how it works:
-SDZ and SD7 are just normal zip and 7zip compressed files renamed. Never ever use the solid archive option if you use 7zip compression.
-SDD is the special extension for an 'open' mod directory, most useful for developing. To use an sdd, just make a folder called <anything>.sdd in your Spring/mods/ directory and then add in all the sub-directories (bitmaps, gamedata, units, scripts, objects3d, etc) inside of it. SDDs are useful for developing since you don't have to repack the mod to test each change, but there are (or at least, recently were) difficulties syncing SDDs in multiplayer without hacking your mod hashes.

I don't have time to go on but if you still need a starting point I'd recommend getting Flozi's barebones mod structure file. I'll tell him to post the link here.

[MidKnight]

heh, i know how it feels like having to peice together the tutorials into coherent information. luckily at that time, many devs were available on chat so that i could pester them with my amazingly stupid questions. While I DO NOT suggest following my method of learning, feel free to ask lots of questions!

now to answer your questions:
Programs:
the GIMP can be found at http://www.gimp.org/
Wings3d or, alternatively, Blender, may be found at http://www.wings3d.com/ and http://www.blender.org/ , respectively

Both Blender and Wings have their own built-in UVmapping suites, so you don't need to use a seperate uvmapper, but of course, you can, it all depends on preference.

SpikedHelmet's guide is probably the best texturing guide available here, you've already found it, so I won't post a link

UpSpring isn't as hard as it looks, toy with it a bit, and it'll becom easier.

Scriptor and COB aren't really my thing, but the wiki has tons of good info about it.

To make Teamcolor in the GIMP:
1: finish your texture
2: select which parts you want teamcolored (with box/eclipse/lasso select/magic wand, or any other select tool)
3: flatten image (WARNING! SAVE AN XCF BEFORE DOING THIS)
4: right click on layer --> add layer mask
5: tick the "initialize to: selection" box
6: save a copy as a .tga file, and press okay/export to the following 2-3 dialog boxes
7: import into upspring, and marvel at your shoddy teamcoloring!

Textures:
Texture 1 is the skin. you draw whatever you want people to see on your model, apply teamcolor as alpha, and save

Texture 2 is reflection and glow. Until you get a hang of this, it's probably best to use a plain black image for this. shades of green signify reflectivity and shades of red, glow.


I should make this into a full-scale tutorial

should I?

[FLOZi]

I don't have time to go on but if you still need a starting point I'd recommend getting Flozi's barebones mod structure file. I'll tell him to post the link here.

download/file.php?id=1137


There's also one by SpliFF which may be more up to date than mine:

viewtopic.php?f=14&t=17532

[ClockworkIndustries]

Thank you very much for the help, everybody. Mass downloading ahoy!

Edit: OK, big problem. I extract Scriptor to the desktop and try to run it. It comes up with "The ordinal 6625 could not be located in the dynamic link library MFC42.DLL" and does not run. Can anyone help with this?

[Pressure Line]

I should make this into a full-scale tutorial

should I?

too bad I already did that a year ago. illustrated, covering the steps from exporting from wings, to importing into upspring, adding the alpha channel to tex1, setting the object origins, and saving as an s3o.

hint: its a sticky in the 'games and mods' forum

[MidKnight]

I should make this into a full-scale tutorial

should I?

too bad I already did that a year ago. illustrated, covering the steps from exporting from wings, to importing into upspring, adding the alpha channel to tex1, setting the object origins, and saving as an s3o.

hint: its a sticky in the 'games and mods' forum

I've read it. I just happened to use blender and lacked all modeling skills at the time

Also, your tut has a few discrepancies, that seem, unfortunately, unfixable unless you included a basic COB tutorial (IE base and flare)
READ: MAEK COB TUT PL0X

unrelated: it'd be nice if we all worked together and made one multibranching supertut, which starts with placing the first vertex of your model and ends with a fully functioning ingame unit. The we could add 'branches' for different nit types/designs, different modeling programs, etc. so that newbies could get working right away without having to pore over a dozen tutorials

[emmanuel]

read : read the wiki :
http://spring.clan-sy.com/wiki/Units0:.bos