Q: cursors ...

ViruZ · Post by **ViruZ** » Thu Dec 19, 2002 10:07 am

Ive continued to mod the GUI in FOT and eventually had a bit of a run in with cursors...

the main GUI cursor is a no brainer with "top left" as hot spot but the ingame (move, attack etc) are a different matter..

they are centered and dont use "top left".
since they are zar i cannot view them in psp/acdsee to check for any markers in them used as hotspot indicator..
(ive tried using a 255,0,255 pixel in the center and creating them as with the fonts, but no luck sofar )

does anyone have info on what tells FOT to have these icons use center instead of "top left" as hotspot?

Jimmyjay86 · Post by **Jimmyjay86** » Thu Dec 19, 2002 1:24 pm

If you haven't already I would suggest dloading Redviewer!. It supports the viewing and exporting of zar's. Not sure if it will help you with the hot spot but if that doesn't work then try pm'ing Section8

Red · Post by **Red** » Thu Dec 19, 2002 4:50 pm

ZARs don't include any hotspot information.

If it's defined by a special colour (or alpha value), you can export it to TGA in my viewer and then view it in PSP in more detail.

ViruZ · Post by **ViruZ** » Thu Dec 19, 2002 7:17 pm

i have exported the zars with the red viewer and looked them over , and cant find any indication of any special color indicators.

im more and more leaning toward the conclusion that the hot spot is hardcoded to top-8 and left -15 in the engine itself...

Red · Post by **Red** » Thu Dec 19, 2002 10:58 pm

Bascially that's also how I think of it, as otherwise they would have found a way to slap it into the ZAR format, or made a new format for it.

Which evedently sucks.

On the bright side, if you make your picture 8 pixel/15 pixels taller (and slap transparant stuff there), then the ZAR will be "centere" on the top left. On top of it, the ZAR itself won't be much bigger than the original (without this centering stuff) would have been as the RLE compression will take care of all these empty pixels. It'll still be a bit bigger though.

ViruZ · Post by **ViruZ** » Thu Dec 19, 2002 11:33 pm

yup it looks that way... i basically vanted to do a more 3d icon but i have to do with beeing able to change their look.

these are some i made to test transparency settings and visibility:

you can download the PNG's here .

(they look better in game:)

thanks for your feedback guys!, next ill try to setup maya to automate the render process for the spritestage.... and finish off the GUI mods..

i hope you are still feeling bound by your statement of making a tga -> spr importer Red

still messing with it but its coming together....

ViruZ · Post by **ViruZ** » Thu Dec 19, 2002 11:55 pm

find something really interesting in my Fallout/MOD/gui/ catalog... a file called cursor.cfg........

hotspots are defined in the CFG file...!!!

DOH..

Red · Post by **Red** » Fri Dec 20, 2002 4:30 am

Been a while I looked at FOT and concentrated on FO lately... I'm totally forgetting about these text files lying all over the place in FOT...

And yes my promise still holds. If a graphic artist works hard enough to produce what I need to process new sprites then I'll work hard enough for it to work

.

Now all this talk about centers made me realise there might be trouble with centering of images. Ideally you'd get your 3d renderer to specify a center for the image. I beleive we'd need a file describing the centers, or an image format that supports it. Actually TGA has such a feature and we could create a PNG extention for it though I don't know wether MAYA'd (or anything else) support it. Not to mention my viewer doesn't support PNG.

Flamescreen · Post by **Flamescreen** » Fri Dec 20, 2002 9:24 am

Well, for anyone with Photoshop, .png can always be converted to .tga which is very good to have.

ViruZ · Post by **ViruZ** » Fri Dec 20, 2002 9:40 am

since i use a sprite stage all sprites will be centered by default ... this we have to check though....

how are the game handling the centering of images?
if we need a txt file for instance to go with the importing of sprites to specify the center i must really script this into maya.. since editing these by hand would be very time consuming....

BTW ... what does the SDF! by my nick mean???

Jimmyjay86 · Post by **Jimmyjay86** » Fri Dec 20, 2002 3:56 pm

Using Redviewer or Spray you can specify the bounding box of the sprite. This will define the origin and the centering. It is graphical so you can create the box around the object.

Umm, I think SDF means Some Dumb Fuck?, Not really sure on that but it is the beginner/newbie tag until you get enough posts to move up in ranks. Email Kreegle to ask for the venerated Map Rats title.

Red · Post by **Red** » Fri Dec 20, 2002 10:45 pm

ViruZ wrote:since i use a sprite stage all sprites will be centered by default ... this we have to check though....

how are the game handling the centering of images?

Well you COULD render the thing so that the image size is always the same and make maya center it appropriatly, however the currently used approach is that each image is cropped to the pixels it has, and thus each has it's own center (since if you were wielding a sniper riffle while looking "right" the center wouldn't be the same as when looking "up".

if we need a txt file for instance to go with the importing of sprites to specify the center i must really script this into maya.. since editing these by hand would be very time consuming....

Yes, VERY time consuming. I was hoping we could use it directly in the file format (as I mentioend TGA has such a field), however failing that we'll need a text file. On the bright side of the text file we could add some other parameters to it (like wether we want to use the optimization I talked about in the email I sent you, if you want that animation compressed and possibly other stuff that's escaping me).