Iron Wars development thread (download not available)

[IskatuMesk]

Er... what the docks

Are you saving it as an OS/2 RLE-format BMP?

[Ardis]

It's saved as a 256 color bitmap and was converted to GRP using SFGRPConv. Maybe it was just a damaged file, I'll try again and get back with the results in a few minutes.

EDIT: Nope, same thing.

EDIT2: May or may not be relevant, but I was lazy and used Paint to save them as 256 color bitmaps.

[IskatuMesk]

I use paint shop pro, personally, and script everything. Shift + O, select unit palette, save as -> bmp, options: OS/2, RLE. Otherwise I have no idea what is going on. :\ Unless the images.dat settings are set to something weird.

[Ardis]

Whatever is going wrong is happening during the conversion because it has that color/disaster even in the preview in GRPEdit.

[IskatuMesk]

Grpedit's view distorted a lot of colors on my AO graphics that were otherwise perfectly fine ingame... but eh.

Try using PSP?

[Ardis]

Do you think Gimp would work instead? I don't have Paint Shop Pro and I can't really afford much in the way of software right now, especially this time of year.

[IskatuMesk]

I have never used gimp and I know nothing of it.

I would be lying if I said I put money into any form of modding.

[Ardis]

Here's an older version of the ship. Originally I took the renders directly from Blender and ran them through RetroGRP* and this is what it looked like. In comparison to what I'm getting from GRPEdit and SFGRPConv (EDIT: Refer to above), I'm satisfied with the old way now...



*I must be the only person in the whole damn 'verse this thing works for because everyone else has problems with it and tells me to use something else which doesn't work for me.

EDIT: I feel REALLY stupid now because apparently I uploaded the same image on the last page...

[bajadulce]

Looks like a winner!  Fun looking GUI too. 

RetroGrp worked fine for years and years and if you don't mind some of the quarkyness then who cares as long as it works for you.  I remember trying to convince long time users of retro such as Ago Trooper at Warboards and they had a hard time giving up on retro.  Obviously they have done fine with it as evident by the fantastic .grps created by Ago.    Anyways... straying from the topic.. sorry.

Are those team colors red or is that just a render that missed the proper palette index?

If you take those frames and convert them to a .gif, then there are gif programs that can help you pluck away at global palettes as well as simplify the centering of your .grps as well.  Something a lot of mods suffer from (off-center jerky animated .grps.)  With rad smaker tools you can then convert the .gif to .grp using the proper palette and all is good with the world.

Good luck with your mod.  Glad to see there is actually some life still left in the modding community and someone who is actually doing something. 

[IskatuMesk]

RetroGRP is awful and a replacement was long needed.

[bajadulce]

Heck ya RetroGRP sucks big time!  I've been using SFGRPConverter since the day she released the thing and never looked back.  She even made the uncompressed format when I stumped O)Farty and her with the ORAI replay icons.   

But I get a big kick out of ppl who say RetroGrp doesn't work when it obviously does and has for years and years.  I sure as hell don't ever plan to use it ever again tho.

[IskatuMesk]

I used it for the longest time, too, but the bugs that crept up on you at points were just ridiculous. Like how it would outright crash starcraft by corrupting my DyiithJhinn Hellgate just because of the circular lines, I had to blur the frames just to get it to not crash. I still don't know how that happens.

Oh, and when it generates extra pixels when you export frames. It's not something that happens often, but if you look at the Oblivion in AO and see this weird line on his wrists - that's from retrogrp.

[bajadulce]

Oh wow I had no idea how fucked up that program really was.  Poiuy's PyGRP is a nice program for viewing files QUICK, but I can't get the GUI version to work.  SFGRPConverter is such a solid and simple program.  It has never crashed or done anything "odd" even once in the thousands of times I've must of used it. 

Anywho.. You (Ardis) should describe the steps you are using with SFGRP and maybe someone can spot why it isn't working for you. 

[Ardis]

First time I rendered the sprites in Blender and grabbed them all from the /tmp directory it stores them in, then just threw them into a .grp like that using GRPEdit and got a messy .grp file that had colors I didn't even use in Blender (refer to attachment 1) Oh, and umm... GRPEdit just randomly shut off on me right after I made the .grp for the attachment...

Second, I tried converting them down to 256 color bitmaps, then running them through SFGRP and got different, but still horrible, results (refer to screenshot at top of page three)

Third time I went back to the old RetroGRP way where I just converted the direct renders into sprites and got distorted colors, but still decent sprites. Yes, the red is the team color.

I have had issues RetroGRP in the past, but I found that wiping the RetroGRP directory clean and re-extracting the files from the .zip file seems to fix them.

[bajadulce]

upload your raw .bmps.  and I can take a look.  That .grp you uploaded doesn't do much good to locating where you are goofing up in compiling, but does give insight as to an improper palette.    Upload your SC "unit" palette too. 

Here is mine:  You can see I use green as my transparent color as this works much better than 0000. 

I don't see any of the attachments in the "preview" window nor a way to add the link to the post other than at the bottom???  So not sure if .act is an uploadable file type.  here's the file in .zip as well.