PERFECT SPRITE EXTRACTION

[Endoperez]

Nah, I don't think this's the biggest thing to happen here. Those who can draw will still draw their sprites by hand, but perhaps a bit quicker than earlier. Those who are too lazy to draw still won't. The handful of would-be modders who don't want to spend their time making pixel-soldiers will get their mods finished, and might post them here. However, this won't start an explosion of mods - we already had that one! Really, I don't remember having seen this many active mod threads in DomII forums, ever. I don't know what the big thing was, but it sure must have been spectacular to have this kind of an effect!

[normalphil]

Endoperez said:
However, this won't start an explosion of mods - we already had that one! Really, I don't remember having seen this many active mod threads in DomII forums, ever. I don't know what the big thing was, but it sure must have been spectacular to have this kind of an effect!

For me, I'm pretty sure it's the eras and not having to overwrite an existing faction. All of a sudden there's a narrative, and the reason for me to make a mod isn't just to see how a given set-up plays, it's also a way to tell a story. Was never seriously tempted to make a DomII mod.

[Gandalf Parker]

Its pretty much what was done in Dom2 to create the library we had. Someone also created a macro which worked its way thru the entire All_Units game to save all of the units to a graphic named for its unit ID number.

We do have a complete collection for Dom3. Altho its a couple of patches old so a few might be missing. Its in the Tools and Tutorials link.
Dom3 Unit Reference v3.04

If I remember correctly there were like 5 filters that could be turned off in order to get the cleanest image-grab. The result tended to look ugly without the smoothing and shadowing effects that the game does, but the end results were better. If you edit a "smoothed" copy of an image, and then the game smoothed it again, it tended to be pretty blurry.

[Sombre]

I can't get that link working (the one pointing to the reference, not your one pointing to the thread) and I was under the impression the images weren't the right size.

Endo: I think you underestimate the difference between drawing a peltast with a new kind of shield by hand and just grabbing the shield from one unit and pasting it on another. Look at the hoch-hammer unit I made - it's basically a modification of the hochmeister, but in order to make that before I knew about this, I had to basically redraw the hochmeister himself. That takes a lot of time and effort.

Some of the mods on here have used some fairly shakey graphics. With this technique they can cut and paste and edit a bit using these graphics and make something which looks much better and fits with Dom3. Again, the difference between drawing from a very rough / blurry template or from scratch and just modifying an existing graphic is huge.

[Gandalf Parker]

Hmm worked just now for me using Firefox.

Editing sprites for this game IS much easier when there are some to cut-n-paste from. Making a combat image (the second sprite for the "combat" move in case there are lurkers reading this) is much easier by cut-n-pasting the arm into a new position. Making new sprites by changing some colors of a unit image, or pasting together pieces of different images, also helps. Even just having an example to use for sizing and such.

Of course eventually its good to draw your own but I think this is a great thing for that middle section between just changing the text and completely designing your own units. And it will be a particular help to the "improved nations" modders who are working with the nations that are already in the game.

[Foodstamp]

Bah, you got me excited. I thought you had found a way to extract the attack sprites too. Knowing the optimal settings will definitely reduce the time I spend on sprites if I decide to edit in game sprites.

Now if we can get the modding graphics limit cap fixed, I may consider replacing some of my reused sprites with custom ones in a few of my mods.

[Gandalf Parker]

I think he was emphasizing "perfect sprites" rather than "perfect extraction"

and I thought the sprite cap was worked out. Something to do with the order that the commands were put into the mod file?

[Foodstamp]

Gandalf Parker said:
I think he was emphasizing "perfect sprites" rather than "perfect extraction"

and I thought the sprite cap was worked out. Something to do with the order that the commands were put into the mod file?

Really? If so, this is great news. I have been steering clear of adding new graphics because of this bug.

[lch]

Endoperez said:
Would it be possible to do a shortcut for Dominions that first replaces guiborder2.tga with some other tga file, then launches Dom with a --postexec command that somehow replaces the new guiborder2.tga with the original? Or copy of the original, actually, but you know what I mean. It would enable one Dom directory to be used for both normal games AND for ultra-quick screen-grabbing of units, with the only difference being in the shortcut used to launch Dom.

I'm pretty sure it could be done with two .bat files, but I can't write those.

Something along the lines of Code:

---

@echo off

ren "<path to file>\guiborder2.tga" guiborder2.old

ren "<path to file>\guiborder2.new" guiborder2.tga

"<path>\dom3.exe"

ren "<path to file>\guiborder2.tga" guiborder2.new

ren "<path to file>\guiborder2.old" guiborder2.tga

---

Batch files are like shell scripts, just a collection of commands that you would type into the command line window.

[Endoperez]

I know that, but I don't have experience with shell commands or command lines in general. Using renaming that way is also new to me. Thanks, I can use that.