I think that it is entirely possible to arrive at 100% legal textures that are beautiful, useful, and do not suck. All I need is for some folks to help me out here- I am not willing to do everything myself, as I am not ever going to use 3DO ever again, and this effort would primarily help mods that are trying to achieve GPL-friendly status. This is mainly for the older mods, that really need a beauty upgrade, but cannot be easily converted over to S3O. Anybody with painting skills, please help, and we can get this done in a week or two at most!
We can have 256 square textures at 128/128, in sets of 16, to allow for a huge variety of textures. We can also have specialized sets that are 64/128 that are meant for specific uses, such as treads for tanks, etc., and if an artist completes a nicely-made 4-block of 64/64 textures that still play nicely with the rest of the set, then we can use them. However, I do not want to see anything smaller than 64/64 or larger than 128/128, and only complete sets will be accepted- don't send me a singleton, ok?
I am willing to begin working on this, but I want help and some support. I need help with three major areas:
1. Anybody who would be willing to complete sets that total 128/2048 pixels, that are beautiful and fit a "set", would be contributing to the effort. To maintain quality standards, here are the requirements for submitted work:
A. Use a light angle of 120 degrees (this is the Photoshop default). This will ensure that things like drop-shadows, bevels, etc. all match exactly, which is important for quality assurance.
B. If you're going to submit a set here, use JPEG at maximum quality. Otherwise, email the set to me.
C. Sets are specified below, follow the guidelines to give us things that are high quality and fit the set theme.
D. Test any textures that may be used for mating surfaces to make sure that they tile correctly. It is better to have square textures with nice borders that will look good tiled next to each other than to have textures that will only tile with another specific texture, or tile with themselves, but nothing else. See my samples from the Olive Drab set to see how I used a very simplistic bevel to make a nice neat border. There are lots of other valid approaches, but this is one of the easiest.
E. I am quality control. Period. Do not send me ripped-off tiling textures from some random Internet site and tell me it's a "set" because they're all vaguely brown. Do not tell me that you need texture Y just for your mod- that's why we're going to break the final collection up into 16 GAF files, and 16 UnitTextures/tatex directory-pointing SDZ files ... so that we can give you the ability to have a texture space of whatever arbitrary size you'd like for your project needs, by dropping whatever you don't use.
The idea here is for us to get to a higher level of quality, while giving modders a flexible route for specific needs, not to satisfy every possible "customer"- modularity and multiple-use is the ruling principle here.
Here is a basic example texture. I am working on the Olive Drab armor set today, and this is a good example of what we need:
Note that it's nicely designed for tiling with others, has a bevelled edge, and is nicely generic, and isn't trying to steal the show with fancy detail- it has nice details, but is subtle. This is the kind of thing we need at least one or two of in every major armor set, so that modders have something generic to work with.
2. Here are my proposed sets. Because of the wide variety of possible Spring projects, we cannot possibly cover every possible piece of ground, but this will get close enough for most people's purposes.
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1 = Olive Drab Armor. A generic set of armor tiles designed around Olive Drab. Useful for all sorts of military and near-future mods. Camoflauge and jungle variants might be nice, too.
2 = Tan Armor. A generic set of tan/brown/black armor tiles designed around a shade of light tan. Great for military mods, desert-warfare units and other things.
3 = Metallic Armor. A set designed for OTA-like game designs where bare metal is often part of the artistic appeal. Layered, riveted, welded- it doesn't matter, just sure it looks like realistic metal, whether shiny or rusted, with minimal greebles- these should not be attention-grabbers. Make sure that they tile well and will play well with others. Metallics should be TGA, to make use of the alpha and have proper reflectivity, since we do not have glowmaps.
4 = Black Armor. A set designed for OTA-like game designs, or any game where you really need that evil color. Do not use pure black as the starting color- use 010 010 010 please. Keep brightly-colored greebles down to a minimum- people may be using this as an accent color, for stripes, etc.
5 = Winter Armor. Whites, blotched armor with gray, or light blues. Keep obvious smears/rust/splotches down- the objective here is give people generic things to work with. This really needs to be a complete set, for best compatibility.
6 = Tiger-stripe camo. Basically, I'm hoping to see some nicely-tiling yellow/black camoflauge here, so that OTA units can still have that particular Cavedog wrinkle.
7 = Gray armor. From mods like SWTA to E&E, there is always a strong demand for the classic Star Wars look, with dull gray armor with lots of greebles. I know I keep saying this over and over again, but make sure that the final result tiles well and has a strong border, so that you can mix it with other things. Different shades of gray are entirely OK, just don't make the differences so wild that any two of them right next to each other look really horrible, k?
8 = Red / Blue-green armor. These are two colors that many people like to use for stripes and extra details, but not as a main color for units.
9 = Brown / Blue armor. Again, these are typically used for extra detail, or to accentuate a design.
10 = Logo armor. This is a very tricky area, due to the limitations imposed on 3DO. Basically, we need sets of 10, 32-pixel logo textures. The bigger issue is that people should not be using Arm and Core symbols, period, so that this is legal under the GPL. If people want to have a fight over what new symbols to use... do that elsewhere, please, and don't clutter up my thread ;)
11 = Glass. From the simple-but-beautiful windowpane with a border and an alphamap to cut-blocks to mirror surfaces. The trick here is in the alphas, and using good glass colors- blues and greens. This may be a good area to make at least one 4-block of 64's, for small glass areas or random details, like colored lights on units, etc.
12 = Metallic Greebles A. What would a futuristic mod be without all sorts of random metallic greebles? Boring, of course. Therefore, we need greebles, from gun-barrels, to hatches, to grates, etc. Making random greebles in Photoshop isn't very hard, especially since everything will use the same light angle for things like bevels- the trick is coming up with various clever ways to border the tiles, so that some appear to be inset, and some appear to be surface details, etc., etc.
13 = Metallic Greebles B. More mechanical details, random computer-like circuitry, and other random-but-interesting bits and pieces that can be re-used in a variety of places and contexts.
14 = Non-Metallic Greebles A. These are things like solar panels, pipes, yellow caution stripes, aircraft landing-pads, and all of the other random details that will be needed by a lot of mods. It'd be nice to have a set of different-colored gradients using 32/32 squares here, too, for all of the uses people like gradients for, as well- remember, 16 32/32s can be put in the same texture space as 1 128/128, so that's a pretty nice set of gradients.
15 = Non-Metallic Greebles B. More random detail textures. It'd be nice to have some high and low detail stone walls, brick walls, etc., for doing buildings with, among other things, as well as futuristic stuff.
16 = The One-Off Bin. This is for things that are useful, but are special-purpose or just plain unique. A typical example would be a set of 64/64 plant-leaf textures that are designed with green on the r/l edges and fading in to lighter green stems/veins, etc. in the middles, carefully set up to tile vertically. Or sets of 128/32 tank treads. Etc., etc.- this is a grab-bag for those who're either too lazy/time-crunched to do more than a few textures, or for very specific planned uses that can get re-purposed by other people.
So... that's about it. If you want to help, just announce which set you're going to complete. When we get done with all of them, we'll make 16 GAFs, so that unit-makers have something that they can use to re-texture things in 3DO Builder with and set the texture names with, and the entire set of textures can become a standard part of Spring, or provided to the community as a GPL-friendly "download this first to use my mod" sort've thing. If enough people sit down and help, we could get this part of the conversion over to GPL done in a couple of weeks, easily, and then modders could begin converting things over to the new textures over the next month or two.
