How do I create a planets.bmp file?

dominictus · #1 April 19th, 2003, 03:26 PM

Hmmm...

Well I already put a lot of work into organizing the planets and making the secttype. As best that I can tell, the order is irrelevent to the game itself, so I'm not ready to scrap this project yet..

Fyron, did you create that planets.bmp that is in the planet pack? So what did you do, just use paint and copy and paste? If so, how did you maintain the 36x36 pixel size, that must have been really tedious? I'm just looking for an easy way to generate the planets.bmp. By using html, I was quickly able to create it on the screen quite nicely. Then I did a screenshot and pasted into paint. The prob though is when I launch the game, the planets are not centered, so I see like 3/4 of one planet and part of another, and NONE of the warp points show up, just white boxes, even though if I click on them the info pane on the top right shows the correct image there, so I know the secttype is working properly.

any ideas?

Thanks,

Dominictus

Suicide Junkie · #2 April 19th, 2003, 08:48 PM

Solid white boxes would indicate that the image location they reference is below the bottom of the planets.bmp
-> You need to increase the height of your bitmap.

If your images are offset by that much, you need to shift them to counter it.
If you used the planetpack bitmap for reference, you probably aligned it to the right, and covered the blue numbering edge with planet images, instead of aligning it to the left.

The order is only relevant to the game for referenceing which planet gets which image. You don't want asteroids looking like stars, for example.

The whole point of the imagemod packs are that players only have to download and install the files once. Since we are talking 60 megabytes of images here, multiplied by however many mods you have, that can add up very quickly.
By using a common set of images, and adding to the end, the BMPs remain backwards-compatible, and have a much smaller footprint on your harddrive.

As for the arrangement of the minis, I did the grunt work there.
It was just Copy and Pasting in paint, using the red & white grid to help align things. Then a renaming of the submitted portraits to match the location of the corresponding minis.

Fyron · #3 April 19th, 2003, 08:48 PM

Quote:

Fyron, did you create that planets.bmp that is in the planet pack? So what did you do, just use paint and copy and paste?

No, SJ did that. See his post for how to do it.

dominictus · #4 April 20th, 2003, 08:33 AM

Just wanted to say thanks for the pointers...
I used SJ's planets.bmp, expanded it out to 1799 pixels tall (for all 1000 objects), drew a clean grid on it, and I've been merrily moving pics around to fit my scheme. almost done (5 hours later.. heh) and preliminary testing is excellent so far.

When I'm done I'll be posting a mod that I'm working on for a pbw game. More info soon...

Dominictus

narf poit chez BOOM · #5 April 22nd, 2003, 06:51 AM

atrocities got competition, i think.

dominictus · #6 April 24th, 2003, 01:48 AM

ok-

I finished creating the planets.bmp; all of the art works, and matches up to the planet files correctly.
However-
the secttype is not matching! All of the stellar objects get the size/description 1 off from the secttype, yet the #'s match. I am completely baffled now.

ideas?

dominictus

Fyron · #7 April 23rd, 2003, 07:33 PM

A lot of the image types are offset by 1. Just change all the numbers in SectType.txt by 1 (IIRC, subtract 1, cause they start at 0).

[ April 23, 2003, 18:33: Message edited by: Imperator Fyron ]