Help with mod! Unit sizes, graphics.

[Anonymous]

It might be related to the aspect ratio. I kind of doubt it, though... I see the top part of a command center on the bottom.

It might have some kind of difference between units and buildings. When you build this command center in-game (as in build it with an SCV) and watch it build and finish, does it crash?

Also, what are you using to compile the grp?

[Durandal-Thoth]

Ah, well that little extra part of the Command Center should only be a strange effect of de-compiling the GRP. I don't notice that in-game nor in the preview. I've been testing my mod extensively, and the only crashing related problems I encounter are with Hatching Hydralisks...

Although it is important to note that I'm running off the 1.14 patch.

I exclusively use RetroGRP, as I never really have any problems with it.

[Anonymous]

The patch version shouldn't have anything to do with it, unless blizzard ended up breaking/fixing more then what we really think.

Does retrogrp say the dimensions are the same when viewing the grp itself?

Additionally, do you have an ingame screenshot of it?

[Durandal-Thoth]

Here are some screens attached, this is a pretty old version of the mod so I haven't touched up the blockiness, and I experience some strange problem with the placement box.

Yeah, everything checks out in Retro.

I attached the GRP so you can see for yourself.

[IskatuMesk]

Maybe it does have something to do with the aspect ratio. I know I had a theory I could make SC load an extremely large GRP if pre-placed in a map, but I wasn't sure if it was possible to get it to load larger grps built in-game. Usually when I tried to build very large units it crashed; assuming the grps ever compiled at all. Usually, retrogrp gave me an error and crashed. Perhaps it can't handle the X axis being really large, or something obscure like that.

Not that it really helps me now, but try giving a unit like the battlecruiser a huge grp and see if it's stable.

[Durandal-Thoth]

I'll try it momentarily, but here Shadowflare shed some light on the GRP's limitations.

http://www.warboards.org/showpost.php?p ... stcount=11

Unfortunately, I can't very well decipher the meaning of most of the post, and the people at Warboards are useless for the most part.

[Anonymous]

I think that's referring to the transparent space, which is kind of ignored by SC's rendering engine once it determines it's transparent.

Which probably means your CC, the actual "flesh" of the CC is probably not even close to the actual dimensions of the frames, while my ships squeezed every tiny bit of space out of 255x255. I still find it odd retrogrp managed to compile them, though.. oh well.



I remember hearing something about SF making a GRP compiling thing. BroodKiller made a new grp compiler based on it (I *think*) but then he retired. I have the said compiler, but it's really buggy and not really usable past sorting huge custom-made grps and finding user-made errors in frame counting.

edit - It would be cool to know if either we misunderstood the limitations of the grp, or if issues were caused by retrogrp, and we had a new compiler or something to add new ships, but it's kind of two years too late to really do anything.

Although, you can always make giant units by using a combination of clever photoshopping and iscript.

[Durandal-Thoth]

Those are some very nice GRP's.

I really don't have much experience in starcraft modding, I have to deduct most of what I say from what I've done, but the best way I can imagine a super-structure/unit is to make a giant picture, then split it into individual 256x256 frames and using Ice place the various frames at different overlays, essentially combining all of the frames into one?

[IskatuMesk]

Yeah, except you'd want to use IceCC. Faster, and stable.

WarGiant was telling me about that way of making a giant ship, although due to SC's limited resolution there was only 1 or 2 units in ITAS I really wanted to make massive but I was really pressed by the sprite limit and didn't have the patience to figure it out exactly.

Basically, you'd want to make a base unit that acts as the actual unit, then have a series of overlays spawned by the main unit that comprise the main parts of graphic. You toy with offsets to place it right.

The only real drawback is, as I said, these things would be massive and if they are air units you will probably easily cover the entire screen and block everything else from sight. You also need like a minimum of 4 free graphic slots for a 4-piece unit, and more if you want bigger.

[Durandal-Thoth]

I'm not much good at coding gruntwork, I like GUI's the most.
Were those sprites in the screenshot you provided pieced together somehow, or are they original?

Edit- It must be linked to the aspect ratio, anything above 256x256 for the battlecruiser produces strange results.
That or it could be linked to some value in the game, I really have no idea.

[Anonymous]

I created them all originally. They were modelled in Rhino 3D. They are all individual grps.

edit - Your glitch with the battlecruiser is the result of either not saving the BMP's as OS/2 RLE or not saving the bmps using SC's palette.

[Durandal-Thoth]

I've often heard of the technique of creating a 3D model and just turning it into 2D frames, but did you accomplish that using a screen capture and crop out the region you want, or can you Literally make something that's three dimensional into a 2D image?

[IskatuMesk]

All 3d modeling programs are capable of something called Rendering, which makes an image from either a camera or a viewport.

Some other units from ITAS...




All of SC's units and graphics were created by blizzard in 3ds max, and rendered in much the same manner all of these units are. Doing the units in anything but a 3d program is asking for a lot of pain, inconsistency, and problems. Although, we did manage to do some fairly cool-looking photoshop/psp edits to existing grps for new graphics.

One of my ships looks like this in Rhino (Untextured because I lost all of my textures in the D drive crash);

http://img217.imageshack.us/img217/3014/image1aaqq6.jpg

[Fatburger666]

I know this sounds stupid but im new to modding and after reading all that im really confused now

[IskatuMesk]

We're talking about the sizes and the creation of unit/structure graphics.