New unit sprites

[Birger]

A new section is up on my page, UNIT SPRITES, added these two exellent units made by Enivid.
Great work!

Missing 18th century Portuguese Soldier

18th century Venetian soldier

Edit: Updated the Venetian soldier with the revised version

 

[Vulture]

NICE....

*shuffles with his feet***

Eeeeh... eeeh... Anyone fancies to make a lot of new uniforms for the AoN era? I've got a kickass book here with uniforms for about every European nation (+USA) starting 1750 till 1965

 

[unmerged(5664)]

Do these include the appropriate instructions on which files to modify to be able to include these spiffy new graphics?

BarristerBoy

 

[Birger]

Yup, it sure does.

 

[Txini]

Am I alone seing the venetian guy in blue when playing??

After opening photoshop changig the bitmap to rgb colour it worked, so if anyone has this problem, this is the way of solving it.
Now I found It gets a red shadow How this should be solved, but guy your works are great except for that colour errors in Venetia, do you think you can do one for example for greeks, with skirt and that hat they used

 

[unmerged(6620)]

You're seeing blue ?

Whoa...now you've got me really confused.

I wish I had a handle on how to reproduce that blue effect that you are talking about, because that was one of the chief contenders for Serenissima Version Two.

As I explained in another thread, making these mods is rather time consuming, and has to be done knee-cap by knee-cap, with a bit of retouching to supress the odd stray pixel.

In order to give everyone a complete 18th century set of figures after making my Portuguese soldier, rather than making everyone wait a few weeks while I copied kneecap after kneecap, I simply grabbed the British soldier and stuck him in place of the Venetian soldier. The colors were close enough for it to work. That's why it is called the Instant Gratification Mod. It will be replaced at some point over the next week or so by the Slow and Painful version.

So that's why your comments really confuse me. If you're going to have technical problems with the visuals, you should be having them with the Portuguese soldier, not the Venetian soldier. As for the red shadow, yes, on the bmp outside of the game the soldier has a red shadow, but when you put the figure in the game his shadow becomes normal. Are you saying that your Blue (my red ?) Venetian soldier is casting a red shadow in the game, or that your modified Blue Venetian soldier is casting a red shadow, or that Paradox's Red British Soldier masquerading as a Venetian soldier (hey, it's Carnival...) is casting a red shadow in the game ? Whew...

As for Evzones...well, I wasn't planning on making them yet, but there's no reason why you couldn't. Just think about the image and deconstruct it. Several of the EU2 figures wear things that could be interpreted as the appropriate skirts, and I'm sure there must be headgear on some of the other figures that, with a little altering, could be made to fit the bill. The trick is to identify prefabricated images that require very little altering from their original form, since you'll have to borrow them fourteen different times on each of the eleven bmp files, and if you do too much hand alteration the animation will start to jump around in strange ways. I'm dying to put hooks on the bills of my medieval soldiers, but I'm waiting until I'm feeling very steady, because I don't want to disrupt the quivering spear graphic.

Oh, I guess that's probably the answer to your question...if I don't figure out how to do naked caribs first, I'm planning on doing the standard nationalities for the fifteenth century.

 

[Txini]

First:

After:

if images are not seen:
First:
http://txiniaguirre.freeservers.com/screensave0.gif
After:
http://txiniaguirre.freeservers.com/screensave1.gif

 

[unmerged(6620)]

Hmm, guess you really are blue ...

First off, we all owe Txini a great debt of gratitude. If he hadn't demonstrated that problem quite so graphically it would have made the problem a lot harder to track down. Thank you very much, Txini. I hereby proclaim you chief graphic image beta tester, order of the Golden Fleece, first class !

I'm still scratching my head over how and why this happened. Over at Combat Mission everything in the CMMOS project (where I do all of my mod work) goes through a testing process that delays everything for about a month, but obviates problems like this one. And I've learned that weird things happen when you're preparing a mod, no matter how sure you are that you got everything right.

My sense is that what Txini is showing us is not a graphics problem as much as a programming problem. The .scr files define the color palette that units are supposed to use, and by changing the palette number you dramatically affect the appearance of the sprites. The good news is that it is easy to fix: there are only three army palettes, so by trial and error I was able to find the right one. The bad news is that there are only three palettes, and this may prove to be a limiting factor later on.

So if Havard is listening, I hope he goes out and tries to find out if it is possible to create extra palettes, or if just the three we have here are sufficient for anything we do. I'm going to have to do some more palette testing on the side, because it has wide ranging implications (none of them good) for some of the other projects I had in mind.

I am not a programer, by the way, so anything I say on this is about as far from gospel as you can get.

In the meantime, I'll send along a revised version of the Instant Gratification Mod with updated .spr files.

 

[Havard]

Re: Hmm, guess you really are blue ...

Originally posted by Enivid
My sense is that what Txini is showing us is not a graphics problem as much as a programming problem. The .scr files define the color palette that units are supposed to use, and by changing the palette number you dramatically affect the appearance of the sprites. The good news is that it is easy to fix: there are only three army palettes, so by trial and error I was able to find the right one. The bad news is that there are only three palettes, and this may prove to be a limiting factor later on.

So if Havard is listening, I hope he goes out and tries to find out if it is possible to create extra palettes, or if just the three we have here are sufficient for anything we do. I'm going to have to do some more palette testing on the side, because it has wide ranging implications (none of them good) for some of the other projects I had in mind.

The palette files seems to be just clips from some army bmps. It should be possible to add more... (don't ask me how though )

 

[merlin2199]

Though this is a good attempt, it seems to me that the Portuguese stripe is the same as the Russian one, and the Venezian stripe is the English stripe. Also, 18th Century Portuguese uniform is made of a white overcoat with dark blue cuffs, a white undershirt and dark blue breeches. No info on the Venezian uniform though. Still, its a long time due.

 

[unmerged(7924)]

Take a look at this... I had the same problem as Txini, but with the musket one (i.e original). Don't know why, I haven't edited anything since.PS! it was blue shadow, not red.

I don't care about it though, I can live with it

 

[AndrewT]

Enivid or Txini? Is this work finished and ready for inclusion?

 

[unmerged(9907)]

Birger Jarl,

I think the original link for the venetian above has got corrupted somehow with a misspelling (gratificatio has acquired an n)

 

[Birger]

Originally posted by Amber Knight
Birger Jarl,

I think the original link for the venetian above has got corrupted somehow with a misspelling (gratificatio has acquired an n)

The original link, was referring to the previous version of the mod, the one with the corrupt colors.
The Venetian soldier mod is updated and working, so the misspelling is "correct".

 

[unmerged(9907)]

I am having a problem in loading the sprites.

When I try to copy them to the game files they simply won't copy.

I didn't have any problem with the 3 corner hat mod (nor in the past with things like MKJs flags) which came similarly packed, but these bitmaps just will not copy across.

I wondered if they hadn't unzipped themselves, but I've looked at the details of the images in explorer and they seem to be same (e.g. they show as "deflated") as MKJ's flag images.

Another strange thing is that the downloaded "18 Cent..." files are duplicated and, within those, the BMP and the SPR files are also duplicated. So there are 4 lots of BMP and 4 lots of SPR I've tried using variations of these copies, but makes no difference.

Finally I can't view the BMPs in the downloaded file, which is odd.

Any idea what's wrong, otherwise I shall have to give up trying to use these, which would be a pity.

 

[unmerged(6620)]

Originally posted by Amber Knight
I am having a problem in loading the sprites.

When I try to copy them to the game files they simply won't copy.

I didn't have any problem with the 3 corner hat mod (nor in the past with things like MKJs flags) which came similarly packed, but these bitmaps just will not copy across.

I wondered if they hadn't unzipped themselves, but I've looked at the details of the images in explorer and they seem to be same (e.g. they show as "deflated") as MKJ's flag images.

Another strange thing is that the downloaded "18 Cent..." files are duplicated and, within those, the BMP and the SPR files are also duplicated. So there are 4 lots of BMP and 4 lots of SPR I've tried using variations of these copies, but makes no difference.

Finally I can't view the BMPs in the downloaded file, which is odd.

Any idea what's wrong, otherwise I shall have to give up trying to use these, which would be a pity.

I'm actually not supposed to even be here for the next few months, but I glanced in and I'm a sucker for a call for help.

I've just tested the 18th Century Portuguese and Venetian instant gratification mods by downloading them from Birger's site as if I didn't already have them on my computer. I did not go to the length of testing them in-game, but I don't think that is the issue here.

I had no trouble downloading, and everything zipped into folders at the address that I specified as I unzipped them.

And, by the way, there are something like 11 bmp's and 11 sprite files in the corresponding folders.

A couple of comments.

I do a lot of uploading and downloading, and I've found that the best and safest way is to use an entirely manual approach. So for the record, there are no self-installing files in any of my mods. You have to make a safe folder in a directory somewhere (I put mine at the top of the C drive, not even in Program files) and unzip everything into it. Then you move everything manually to its final destination.

I don't understand why you are having a problem, but I also don't understand exactly what you are doing. I think the best thing to do is to explain (in explicit detail) all of the steps that you are taking to download and unzip this thing. Do you have a fairly recent model of winzip ? Are you using any special applications ? Did you go into My Computer, C, whatever folder you put the stuff in, look inside the folder itself (as opposed to a simulacrum of the folder) ?

Another suggestion is that perhaps the files were corrupted in download. If that is the case, these are very small files, so it's no big deal to download them again.

 

[unmerged(9907)]

Thanks for offering the help.

From what you say, and looking again at the actual full file names, I found the problem is that I needed WINZIP to unzip the files where the bitmaps are actually held.

It looked to me visually as though they were self extracting(?) files like all the others I've downloaded with flags/shields e.g. MKJ's 114 flags mod.

I have got hold of a version of WINZIP and using that I have been able to copy the sprites files across to the game files. Now the little guys run around happily in there nice new uniforms.

Could I suggest a change to the readme file, and maybe a note on the site to say that files have to be unzipped manually?

Anyway great work on these.

 

[unmerged(1057)]

Great work guys!!..Hmm..what about a How-To-Guide on unit sprites also..

 

[unmerged(7924)]

Or even better: A template

We will soon need new unit sprites for the MDS, so it would be nice if more people learned how to make new soldiers.

We need modern soldiers btw. those camuflage (spelled wrong, I know) soldiers.

 

[Vulture]

camouflage

Making new unit sprites is ALOT more difficult folks. Don't forget that. It requires 3D modelling software. You can also make every pixel manually, but you'll be stuck working for a zillion years