Requests/Questions/Stuff

Posted: Mon Aug 05, 2002 8:15 am

Er, could you elaborate a little on that?

From what I can gather, you are creating custom sprites of Weapon effects, and they are edged with black shading? It sounds as though you are using a black and white alpha channel, where something is either transparent or not. The original FOT sprites have an 8-bit alpha layer, and as such, have shades of grey so to speak. However, I think even our sprites will have black edging if sprite anti-aliasing is off.

Posted: Mon Aug 05, 2002 9:05 am

You can see how it looks without anti-aliasing by disabling the Alpha in my viewer, in software mode... And you'll notice that there's a darker outline... Which probably means boosting all the other colours up saturated the image into black and white causing it to look like a black outline...

Posted: Mon Aug 05, 2002 8:02 pm

That's right Section8, they do have an outline, but part of it also "get's mixed" with the original color), seems I can use your answer to fix it.
Thanks, I think this and my recently gained experience with Tile making will help solve the problem...

Well, if not I'll just come back with more info, hehe icon_mrhappy

Posted: Fri Aug 09, 2002 1:13 am

Is there a way to turn off the music that's played in the editor? I usually have WinAmp goin' when I'm mappin', and it's wierd hearing two songs at once :mrgreen:

Posted: Fri Aug 09, 2002 4:13 am

Isn't there a switch that you can place in the command line of the shortcut? Maybe -s or /s for sound? You know what I mean?

Posted: Fri Aug 09, 2002 9:29 am

-s will disable sound (highly recommended) as you will get a little performance boost too. -m might disable music (if you want to hear button clicks, etc.) but I'm not sure.

Posted: Fri Aug 09, 2002 2:36 pm

ok.... i have a question... how did you guys set up the 32 cameras and have them all be equally spaced in Max? I'm trying to render a touret that i built for a new vehicle i'm working on... I used a torus with 32 segments, then placed the cameras on each of the segments, then deleted the torus and rendered using videopost... The problem is, however, that the cameras wern't rotated the correct ammount... how did you guys do this? Is there an easier way of shooting the pics? Could you at least give us a Tutorial on how you guys built the immages and shot them so we can try and do it ourselves... i mean that's not giving up anything, you still have YOUR art made by YOUR artists, I just want a little clue on how i can make mine...
Maybe even a touch more help and give up some of the textures, or say where you got them maybe?

Posted: Fri Aug 09, 2002 3:34 pm

We had some scripts to do our rendering, but if you want evenly spaced cameras, then create one, create a dummy, centred on what you want to render, link the camera to it, and then set your angle snap to (360 / <number of rotations>)

Render out a sequence at the first angle, then rotate, and it should snap to the next evenly spaced rotation. Render the sequence from that angle and repeat. Out of curiosity, what version of max are you running?

Posted: Fri Aug 09, 2002 5:10 pm

I'm using 4 and i'm very new at it... as in I just got a hold of it a few days ago and am learning by tutorial slowly. I got to the point where i could render a barrel, and a rough minigun for a touret i'm adding to a rusted VW which I've managed to learn how to break all the glass in, but not add tires to. The VW is from a Model i downloaded, and the barrel is from a tutorial... so I'm not exactally experianced at this.

Btw, you guys built the models used in the game in quite a bit of detail didn't you? I downloaded a bunch of the game art before the game came out, damn nice btw... anyway it occrued to me that it would only be logical to use the models built for the game art in the game since there arn't any poly restraints considering you rendered it already... maybe reduce the poly count on the caracters to reduce the rendering time, but I'd guess you were working on a pretty hefty machine, so I'm not sure how hard that would be. Did you use the same for the sprites as for the game art, just out of curiosity? And btw, your script had directional light form the camera's direction? Did you set up the camera and light then rotate the model for each animation? What kind of file did you guys use to import the animations from MAX to the sprite editor... or rather, what do you render the animations as? How did you make the shadows... i'm rendering on a black background because i don't want to have to take anything out... that's probabbly a mistake, huh? i should probabbly put something white underneith... You know, I'll give your graphix guys some creidit here, MAX is a hard program to learn and it takes a LONG time (for me anyway) to do anything on it... I'm getting faster... but damn... anyway, any information would be helpful...
I'd like to include 3-4 new vehicles with the project that a friend and I are working on, but that might take quite some time... to do anything with one vehicle has taken me at least a week... I've designed them all, but....
Btw... could I possibly get the texture you guys used to make the crate walls, the ones that are found often in junkyards...
Anyway....uh.... the spelling sux because I've been working on MAX since...uh... 6 or something and it's now 3am... so uh.... yeah....

Posted: Sat Aug 10, 2002 5:52 am

.....Great.

This might sound stupid, but how do you put items in shelves and stuff? icon_confused2

Posted: Sat Aug 10, 2002 10:30 am

At the time, we were using Dual P3 450s, with 512kb RAM and 32mb video cards. However most of our sprite rendering was done overnight, which necessitated the use of scripts to queue up multiple sprite sequences to render while we slept.

Posted: Sat Aug 10, 2002 10:44 am

Very easy. Within the level editor, you want to click on the button on the top that says "Entity Edit". Then pick the shelf you want to add stuff to and scroll down to the Inventory button to add items. Find the entities that you want to add (ammo, books, weapons, etc.). Do you have any problems with any of those steps?

Posted: Sat Aug 10, 2002 1:56 pm

lol, No...Thanks Jimmy!!! icon_mrhappy

:wink: I just thought that was for the chrs. Laughing REALLY FUCKING HARD

Posted: Tue Aug 13, 2002 9:46 pm

I remembered I wanted to ask something. Now that may sound stupid, but...erm, is there a way to run FoT Tools fullscreen? I used the -w switch, and now even if i don't use a shortcut, it still comes windowed. I want to use both modes(each has advantages), so is there anything I can do about it?

Posted: Tue Aug 13, 2002 10:44 pm

Whilst in windowed mode, go into the options screen and choose one of the preset video mode. This will switch it back to full-screen.

Posted: Wed Aug 14, 2002 1:41 am

Thanks Red. As always running to the rescue!

Posted: Wed Aug 14, 2002 5:07 am

Nice one, Red, I needed to know that, too. smile

BTW, does anyone know where the Ruined City ==> Objects ==> CarWash tileset is used in the single-player missions? I'd like to be able to use it myself, but can't for the life of me think how to put it together! icon_wink

Steve

Posted: Wed Aug 14, 2002 6:15 am

I started trying it... but then I think I'm missind tiles with only the demo version as, well, it just doesn't seem that hard, and yet seems to be missing stuff...

http://red.homeip.net:8080/carwash.clp

Which reminds me, wouldn't it be cool to have a site (say... DaC smile

) host a bunch of clp files of complicated stuff to assemble? I remember a lot of people had problems with the vault door and such... Wouldn't it be cool to have such a thing?

Posted: Wed Aug 14, 2002 11:17 pm

Hmm, yeah... Maybe a Custom Tile-Sets section, too.

But having said that, I think the greatest priority should be a Sims-style Custom Tile bank.

Oh, uhh, not that I've ever played the Sims, of course... :oops:

Steve icon_wink

Oh, cheers for the clip, Red!

Posted: Wed Aug 14, 2002 11:23 pm

JimmyJay might want to make such a tile-group eventually. I believe he likes the game enough.

If you did play The Sims, I don't see any reason for embarassment. It was a good game, if you like the genre. I played it a couple of times myself. I probably wouldn't buy it, but that doesn't mean its bad. Its a pretty good world constructing game.