Iron Wars development thread (download not available)

[Ardis]

I recall seeing some mods that actually modified the game types to set them up to use special triggers, meaning you didn't have to use special maps. If I'm interpreting you correctly, and you were to do that approach, then the maps would only run under Use Map Settings.

Example was a small mod called Winter Conquest, you could play it on any land map and it would remove all of the resource nodes for the special resource rules to work. I think the mod was part of some 24-hour mod contest, not sure, but I do have a copy of it.

[Ardis]

Another idea I had in mind was one where certain units (the ones I like the most) will have occasional phrases they state when they fire a weapon or die, or even when they self-destruct (the third faction is getting this ability on some of their larger ships). I would assume this is done through Iscripting, but I haven't looked at any of that for two years...

[IskatuMesk]

Yes, you can have random jumps to play from a random range of sounds (the Great Destroyer does this a lot) in the iscript.

[Lavarinth]

The palette is the same for every grp.

256 colors, yes, but if you extract a palette through Photoshop, it'll only load colors from that GRP itself, so something like yellow Protoss shades wont show up in a palette from a Zerg unit through Photoshop. That's why I suggested a unit, portrait, screenshot- anything that has a similar color scheme.

[IskatuMesk]

That's why you don't use photoshop for anything related to palettes.

[Ardis]

I'm slowly discovering what colors work in-game now, but it looks like I'm going to have to completely recolor all of the IWE ships and half of the Earth ships... Of course, might work out for the better to recolor the IWE ships because they look too... blue-ish or green-ish (depending on the ship) right now. Earth ships have a bit more variety in color right now which is why only half of them seem to need it.

Third faction (which may be in the process of a re-name due to general lameness/lack of originality in faction names) has ships that translate over perfectly in their current state because of their mostly black designs.

[IskatuMesk]

Undead are originally black, but I had to use the DyiithJhinn steel blue from HK because A.) The black was too similar to the other races in the mods and B.) SC'S BLACK TURNS INTO TRANSPARENCY AAAAARGH

Sc's palette has taken many years off of my life. I have like 30 renders of the Kaloth Battleship when I was trying to find a good palette for their race.

[Ardis]

I just found a dark grey that under typical lighting still looks black, but doesn't register as transparency on StarCraft. I recorded a short video of the old mod, but I can't upload it because it would take almost five hours and I don't know if I have any programs to compress it with... Plus, it's a rather stupid video anyways.

Taking time to figure out what colors convert over to SC properly right now. Looks like a few ships don't need too much work done while others need a complete overhaul of color scheme.

[Ardis]

Anyways, that's something I'll figure out in time. What I need to ask now is about one of the major parts of this mod before I actually start working on the units.

What I have in mind to allow units to distinguish between large units and smaller units for targeting (so you don't get big ships one-shotting smaller ones) is that the larger units are going to be treated as ground units. Is there a way to set larger units and buildings as ground units and still have them behave normally in a fleet mod. And yes, I do want large ships and buildings to be able to interfere with each other on movement.

The idea I have right now is I'll just use a tileset editor to make every tileset a space map and make plain space be treated as normal ground so the larger units can move on it and buildings can be built on it, but that might be harder than it sounds because I haven't used a tileset editor before nor do I know how to use one.

[IskatuMesk]

That's what I did; I had a fellow turn the space plating into space terrain and just used that.

As for targeting, I'm pretty sure that you can really only play with elevation heights and the "flyer" attribute to get what you want.

[Ardis]

Kind of what I was going for. Smaller ships would be treated as flying units, allowing them to also move over buildings and large ships while the large ships would be getting out of each others ways and would have to maneuver around buildings rather than just piling up like flying units normally would.

So, what tool do I need to make a tileset into a space tileset that land units can operate normally on?

EDIT: Uploaded is an old (as hell) rendered sprite of one of my ships, the Selveris. This one came out better than some of the others. Also made some changes to the original model, so more recent ones will look noticeably different from this. The new one is giving me some troubles because I changed the color scheme and I'm trying to use different tools for compiling the .GRP files, but it's not going well...

[IskatuMesk]

There is the old tileedit, Farty's Hawt Tiles, and I think another one. I heard though that the latter two didn't work correctly in some instances, making the former the best choice. But I can't recall specifics.

[Ardis]

I'll take a look into those, but it will take me a while to figure out the tools.

Also, for some reason, I'm having trouble with SFGRPConv and GRPEDIT. Tried both and got horrible results each time.

[IskatuMesk]

Shadowflare's grp converter is the only converter I've found to work wholly correctly. I used Grpedit for previews and frame numbering but I remember it having oddities with compiling.

Anyways, your graphics need to have the appropriate palette and bmp settings for them to convert properly.

[Ardis]

If you mean 256 color and set using the units.pal palette, that's what I did. I'll upload the results below.

Something tells me that I did something horribly wrong, but I don't know what.