Paxil Posted February 5, 2004 Report Posted February 5, 2004 Okay, I've made some ship skins. All I did was shrink the continuum ships a bit with adobe photoshop. Once I put them in the the Continuum graphics folder as ships.bm2 and try to play they look out of place in some sort of way (I'm seeing other parts of ships cut off as I turn). Is there a certain way it needs to be aligned or even? certain sizes? I'm a little confused. Help.
Mr Ekted Posted February 5, 2004 Report Posted February 5, 2004 The only requirement for replacing the default bm2 files is that the layout of the sub-images be the same as the original. A ship(x).bm2 file has 10x4 sub-images. Ships.bm2 (all 8 ships) has 10x32 sub-images. The one thing I'm not positive about is if the replacement images need to have the same proportion as the original. You should try shrinking the images so that each ship sub-image fits exactly in a square cell. The defaults are 36x36 pixels.
Dark Nexus Posted February 5, 2004 Report Posted February 5, 2004 as long as the dimensions of each frame are the same and your bm2 image is 4 frames high by 10 frames wide, it will divide the width by 10 and the height by 4 to figure out the dimensions of your shipset. For instance i have a ship bm2 that is 1000 by 400, so that means each frame is (1000 / 10) 100 by (400 /4 ) 100 pixels. In other words just make the frames even and the image needs to have 4 frames going up and 10 frames going accross.
mister manners Posted February 5, 2004 Report Posted February 5, 2004 i was hoping that, does cont. do that to all animated .bm2's?
Yupa Posted February 5, 2004 Report Posted February 5, 2004 all animated images that Continuum uses by default (ie - any animations you add through .lvz that DID NOT COME WITH THE GAME - you can arrange however you like)
»CypherJF Posted February 5, 2004 Report Posted February 5, 2004 Pretty much, however, some animations have more columns and less rows, etc. etc. so just check out the .bm2 file in /graphics/ dir for more information in regards to how many columns and rows..
Paxil Posted February 5, 2004 Author Report Posted February 5, 2004 Okay, got that fixed. What I notice now is each ship roll I've made is in the 800kb range. Is there any way to reduce this? Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't even think the default ship rolls are that big. By the way, thanks for the help.
Mr Ekted Posted February 5, 2004 Report Posted February 5, 2004 Are your images 8-bit? The defaults are all 8-bit and use the SS palette.
»ZiGNoTZaG Posted February 6, 2004 Report Posted February 6, 2004 you can try jpgs and gifs as well, but by the time you get around to making that jpg look as good as the bitmap, its the same size as the bitmap hehe and gifs tend to horribly shred your colors. relative to the pallete used/program used to convert. if your ships dont contain much but basic colors, then 8-bit 256 color RLE bmp will get you the smallest size and best quality. if ya got lotsa colors tho, just leave em raw, unless mayhap you have a slow pc the raw highcolor bmps will simply just look better to a miniscule degree. and compress pretty well for sharing em. a slow HD will tell you its not happy as well.
Fluffy White Bunny Posted February 6, 2004 Report Posted February 6, 2004 What I notice now is each ship roll I've made is in the 800kb range. Is there any way to reduce this?Ok, so you're using photoshop right. When you save the image, go to File>Save for web. Go to the settings pannel and make sure the box that sets the file type is either at PNG-8 or JPEG, depending on what file format you want. In the bottom pannel, there should be some information about the new file size. Already, it should be much lower than it was before, but you can further reduce the file size by playing around with the values in the settings pannel. Keep in mind that in general, the more the file size is reduced, the lower the quality of the image will be, so look for a good medium in between file size and quality until you're happy.
Bargeld Posted February 6, 2004 Report Posted February 6, 2004 When you create the lvz file, it compresses the image anyway... regardless of how much you compress the "original" it should result in similarly sized lvz files for delivery from your zone. The only thing you can really do do help is to reduce the images to 8 bit. (for a real world example, save a high color image (which actually uses color... not all black or all white) as a jpg at 70% and also as a 32bit bmp. Then use your favorite zip program and zip both in seprate files. Compare the file size... should be relatively comparable.)
mister manners Posted February 6, 2004 Report Posted February 6, 2004 yea... just try aadn u se 16 but images >
Paxil Posted February 6, 2004 Author Report Posted February 6, 2004 Okay, I got it now. Thanks alot for all the help.
Smong Posted February 12, 2004 Report Posted February 12, 2004 There has been a similar discussion at another forum. The conclusion was to use .png in most cases. Even if .lvz size is comparable, .png uses less RAM when ctm unzips the .lvz and stores the contents in RAM to send to your video card.
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