Spring RTS Engine

I'm a million times as humble as thou art

[K.B.] Napalm Cobra wrote:We need Earth2150 style build pics, which were just rotating models of the units, that was the pwnage.

I often make units whose models are full of piece that are hidden as soon a the unit starts existing, I use those pieces for special effects. In Spring already they show up and it looks bad when those units are built by a mobile cons. If the Spring engine used a rendering of the model for the buildpic, then it would look bad in the buildpic too. Personnaly I'd rather have a system where I can control precisely what the builpic is, than an automatic system that would fails on my tricky units. So if Spring ever use use rotating models of the unit for BP, then I'd like to be able to either:
- Specify a model that will be used only for the the bp, different from the actual model the unit use
- Run a little script function before rendering the rotating BP, so I can hide some pieces and turn some other pieces into place.
And while you're at it, use the same model or script for the ghost model that is shown when a building order is enqueued.

I believe the thing you're requesting is something similar to this, no?



Absolute Annihilation is the only place you'll find 'em!!! (At least until everyone steals my work... *sniff*)

Need borders. One pixel white 3D border would make them *much* better, especially when playing on their origin maps. Also, the water units should really have their pics taken on maps with blue water. Sure, not all maps have blue water, but it's engrained in people's minds that blue = water, so it's much easier to tell at a glance what that is.

The Arm ones are all on green grass/blue water, the core ones are all on metallic/greenish of Core Prime.

I can see that. I guess I shouldn't have assumed you would know I was explicitly talking about the Core ones there...

And what I said still applies.

I would have taken the green ones on a more translucent glowy green so you could tell better that they are water buildings... but seeing as they are all the same for a team I think people will figure it out pretty quickly for now.

381 new high-quality buildpics in under 12 hours and all I get is "water should be a different colour"? *sniff*

Hmm... I'll see about adding that 1-pixel border. Er... maybe not. Maybe it would be best to stick with the stock set until we know how the new GUI will handle these things.

For the record, the original images look a *lot* nicer than the ones in the screenshot I posted. Spring squishes buildpics vertically by about 10% and makes them semitransparent. From what little I've seen of the new GUI, both of these problems will be gone soon.

Does anyone know a way to batch-convert a ton of PCX files into JPGs? I could post some originals here for you to see.

Sorry... they are very pretty... good job

Lookie

http://www.planetannihilation.com/aa/buildpics.htm

^T3h hawtness. if everyone else steals your buildpics, they better steal the improved unit models too =)

woooow
that is great work, are these models already implemented?

yes, bum, go play AA 1.0 and see for yaself

http://taspring.clan-sy.com/wiki/Absolute_Annihilation

For some reason, the metalmap background makes units in that perspective (no siluette against sky, only metal) much harder to recognice...

More whining... partly about the engine... all the build pics get squished and look yucky in game for some reason

They're semitransparent, that's all. I think in the new GUI they're opaque, like the rest of the gui. WOULD SOMEONE PLEAAASEE WORK ON IT??!

no... not semi-transparent. squished as in not the same aspect ratio as the images were created in, or am I the only person who doesn't have square build pics?

both effects are in spring

If the images are squished by about 10%, why not expand them by 10% before using them? It seems the obvious solution to me.

They cant do that because... um... that would be... um... well... Why dont they do that?