How do I create a planets.bmp file?

[dominictus]

Hey-

This is my first post.. and I need some help.
I downloaded the planet pack so I could add new art. I renamed all of the stellar object bitmaps into Groups, then I created a secttype.txt to include all of them. I organized all the planets 1-388, then grouped the constuctions, asteroids, stars, warp points, etc into their own 'hundreds' so it's nice and organized.
Now, how do I make a planets.bmp file? I wrote some html to create a page 20 wide and filled down in order, but when I convert it to a bmp it's still not lining up. I used a thumbnail utility to convert the bitmaps to 36x36 thumbnails... but something is still not right.

help!!

Dominictus

[Suicide Junkie]

You shouldn't be changing the order of the pictures in the planetpack of the imagemod.

Mods depend on these to be in the same place, so do not move existing images.

You can add new ones to the bottom, and name the new portraits accordingly (reference numbers are given along the right hand side so you don't have to start counting from the first one).

[Fyron]

Why would you make an html file to create a bitmap? Just load up MS Paint. It is in the Accessories folder of the Programs in the Start Window.

And as SJ said, reordering the pics in the bitmap isn't a good idea.

[dominictus]

Hmmm...

Well I already put a lot of work into organizing the planets and making the secttype. As best that I can tell, the order is irrelevent to the game itself, so I'm not ready to scrap this project yet..

Fyron, did you create that planets.bmp that is in the planet pack? So what did you do, just use paint and copy and paste? If so, how did you maintain the 36x36 pixel size, that must have been really tedious? I'm just looking for an easy way to generate the planets.bmp. By using html, I was quickly able to create it on the screen quite nicely. Then I did a screenshot and pasted into paint. The prob though is when I launch the game, the planets are not centered, so I see like 3/4 of one planet and part of another, and NONE of the warp points show up, just white boxes, even though if I click on them the info pane on the top right shows the correct image there, so I know the secttype is working properly.

any ideas?

Thanks,

Dominictus

[Suicide Junkie]

Solid white boxes would indicate that the image location they reference is below the bottom of the planets.bmp
-> You need to increase the height of your bitmap.

If your images are offset by that much, you need to shift them to counter it.
If you used the planetpack bitmap for reference, you probably aligned it to the right, and covered the blue numbering edge with planet images, instead of aligning it to the left.

The order is only relevant to the game for referenceing which planet gets which image. You don't want asteroids looking like stars, for example.

The whole point of the imagemod packs are that players only have to download and install the files once. Since we are talking 60 megabytes of images here, multiplied by however many mods you have, that can add up very quickly.
By using a common set of images, and adding to the end, the BMPs remain backwards-compatible, and have a much smaller footprint on your harddrive.

As for the arrangement of the minis, I did the grunt work there.
It was just Copy and Pasting in paint, using the red & white grid to help align things. Then a renaming of the submitted portraits to match the location of the corresponding minis.

[Fyron]

Fyron, did you create that planets.bmp that is in the planet pack? So what did you do, just use paint and copy and paste?

No, SJ did that. See his post for how to do it.