Duck and Cover

hi. by now, you've probably been through modifying the colours of thousands of customised actor sprites.

i have a question, which i hope you might be able to offer me comments on... but it is not a 'technical' question. it is more accurately concerning your judgment in customising as a Tactics editor...

when you customise BOS actor entities, especially when you are about to put together a squad, whether for a custom sp or to play in the CORE sp campaign, you are open to adjust their hair, skin, team & base colours no?

if you select a STANDARD team colour for the squad you had just created, then you have uniformity. eg. "skull squad", with all members team-coloured in black.
no real restriction really bars you from colouring hair and skin colours any way you want. this is not part of my consideration. BUT what OTHER field of colour is then left for you to brand the individual members of your squad, to more easily distinguish them from one another, and to offer better character? . . . the Base colour! [team colour = already standard black for all]

my question is this = if you place a little colour onto Base Colour [default is none over a preset base?], the outcome looks like crap because the preset base for most armors is too predominant.
if you saturate the base colour to give a strong 'solid' colour, then original details which we (me, at least) cannot reproduce [ such as the BOS insignia on power armors if u look closely] are gone. also, hand held items would take on the base colour's definition.
YET THIS SEEMS TO BE THE ONLY FIELD LEFT WHEREUPON YOU MAY CREATE A SPECIAL DISTINCTIVENESS BETWEEN PARTY MEMBERS EG. "A" has a tinge of red as well as the team colour of black, "B" has a tinge of grey-silver as well as the team colour of black ...etc.... [keep in mind that if you do this, the 'tinge' may appear on your hand-held items also..red coloured minigun, green coloured shotgun yuck...]

...which forces you to think...'should i even have a set, standard team colour of black at all???' i would hate to create a multi-coloured 'rag-tag' party of actors with no team colour, but there seems to be no choice if i want a distinctiveness between my squad members...

if this is because i have under-utilised the image tab controls in entity editor, or because i am missing something, please instruct me. notwithstanding this, i would still be interested to hear your comments and views on uniformity.

Im going to respond to this in a progressive manner, so that you can see my train of thought.

As far as game characters are concerned - any type of character that comes from a group-based organization (like the BOS or reavers) should have a uniform solid color (which should be sort-of camouflaged if it's an organization like the BOS).

As for super mutants, ghouls, raiders - anything goes, they're rag-tag, with alot of personal freedom.

All humanoid robots should probably be color-coded based on what their function is (sniper and heavy weapons for example are models with different software - tag skills, could make one of them graphite black with a green overcoating with a shiny metal overcoating on other surfaces, and the other one could be camouflaged - it's up to you).

I've always felt - at least with FoT, that characters should be color-coded based on what they can do. More viscious colors for the more dangerous characters (like how bees and wasps are red and yellow - two colors signifying danger in nature).

On this note I made my super mutants which use .50cal guns a combination of sky blue and intense pink. I made the rocket launcher super mutants mostly a deep red, with smaller armor plates being orange. I made the basic super mutant soldier camouflaged (dark beige and greyish green). I made the extended super mutant soldier (one inbetween basic and heavy) as solid white as I could - it looks like ash... and to fix it even more I made it one whole hell of alot tougher than other mutants with extra resistance/threshold against lasers and plasma (with a weakness to electric, and a negative damage threshold <making it take an extra 25 damage if electric is involved>).

Weither you want to do this or not is up to you - though it tends to make the game easier (ooh, that's one's so hard it hurts my eyes, i'd better stay away from it... as if us experienced FoT players dont already know the layout of all the SP levels already).

It's a known fact that the U.S. Navy flight crews have color-coded uniforms based on what their function is on the flightline.

Odd characters break the norm (these could be any color from black to hot pink), Intelligent characters tend to pick the best colors regardless of team preference (they're always camouflaged). Characters in the middle tend to go with a specific color (like a base of black and a team color of greyish blue, hair and skin being varied at will).

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The various colors (4 of em) apply to different sections of the character sprite - how they do it is beyond me - I am not able to modify sprites (I dont ahve anything to de-construct or make .spr files).

For things like weapons and armor - there are no sub-divided sections, and "base" is the only color change that effects them.

So for instance if you wanted to make a dark grey garand rifle - you set the saturation to 100% (the bar labeled "S"), you set the flood control to 100% (the bar labeled "A", dunt know what it stands for), and you go pick your color.

<NEW>:
In the color palette section you can input numbers well over 100% in the Saturation and Value numerical checkboxes... producing color changes that make the sprite brighter than it was originally drawn... (useful for dark sprites, like the micro fusion cell).

you wrote:-
So for instance if you wanted to make a dark grey garand rifle - you set the saturation to 100% (the bar labeled "S"), you set the flood control to 100% (the bar labeled "A", dunt know what it stands for), and you go pick your color.

from extensive testing, saturation (s) can be expressed as "how true to the color you have selected [H,S%,V%] is added", irrespective of HOW much is actually added to the whole sprite section. "A" [i do not know what it stands for also, ... 'added (colour) perhaps'... is the TOTAL percentage that the selected sprite area affected is added with your selected colour (as modified by Saturation of course), i think it as "how much paint of a colour you can utilise to cover a piece of equipment"
TEST = try putting S at max, if you add in zero A, you still won't affect the base colour, because no paint of the colour at S level is actually added.

you have some pretty interesting ideas about colour-coding.

i'll keep Base section for all character classes at default : none, as i prefer my hand-held items to remain 'pure'. [silver/black steel weapons look nice...but i trust the original base colouring in FOT...and do not want to tamper with this]
i am trying to mix 2 colours of a single section now [team], but of course, u realise that this is only possible if one of the 2 colours is on the Grey-Scale....with the other being a light hue, but it has to be pretty dark! [V at 12.5% to 25%], otherwise, my squad would be too colourful...[each one a different shade=like power rangers yuck!]

there is a good [so i've heard] sprite decompressor/compressor/editor you can download from DAC, i don't remember it's exact location now, nor have had the time to learn its usage. maybe you can try it...?

thanks

Spray 1.0(upgrade on its way as I'm hearing)

flame i have all the DAC tutorials, but have been unable to locate one dealing with the mod of sprites. do you know if one exists somewhere?

You can't find one, cause it is extremely difficult to modify them. That is if you're looking to modify the character/armor sprites. For simple objects its so simple a 5year old can do it, once you get a grip of the basics. Also you can always just go back to the old dac forums and check the info at FoT editing forum there.
Try here for a small tutorial by JJ86

-FS