I was wondering the same thing. It’s actually even worse on my monitor – the image’s brightness is so low as to be nearly nonexistent. It’s just a square of black with some faint smudges of dark orange here and there.
Alimarin, I’ll try to help you with this graphics mystery.
My concern is that you’re doing graphics work on a computer with a monitor that’s drifted far out of calibration. I saved your image of the destroyed Cougar, raised the brightness to better match the undamaged ship’s picture, and am uploading it here. Hopefully the comparison between these two versions of it will help you in figuring out to what extent you need to adjust your monitor’s output settings. Good thing I got to see this before you began creating graphics for the dozens of other starship hulls you’re planning.
Before you ask, I am using a professional S-IPS -type monitor that’s been calibrated. The difference between that and the widely-known poor quality of the TN-type screens used for nearly all laptop computers and most desktop consumer-grade computers is like night and day.
Something definitely went way wrong when you made your hulk. In Photoshop, I pushed the Brightness control to max value (+150%) and barely anything changed! I had to use the Exposure control instead, which is strong medicine. The attached pic here shows what adding +5.30 exposure did in the effort of trying to make the hull visible. Alimarin, I’m afraid that the original hulk image is beyond saving, mate. The hull is somewhat visible when seen on my display, but it’s still too dark. Let us know what this looks like on your display – if it seems much too bright, then your display needs some adjustment.
Okay this is weird, I can get the actual hull in-game, but the damaged and hulk variants are still giving white boxes… I don’t even know why it is either, I have the alpha channel and mipmaps generated…
im not sure, but i think you have to name the files “myship_damaged.dds” and “myship_hulk.dds”. try that if you havnt already.
the deserter mod is still in alpha stage. alot will change, so if you include my mod now, it will be waay off later on. so not right now… and i cant prommise that ill allow it later iether. i hope im not comming off as a selfish douche, but i dont like to leave the the work of my mod into other peoples hands. i may however help out with ship designs (since thats really the only freelance work i am comfortable with)
that said, good luck with the mod! i hope you realise what a huge task you have put on your shoulders!
I wouldn’t rely too heavily upon that hull-editor from Cliffski.
[size=110]Be sure to only work on one hull at a time. As soon as you’re done with it, save your work
and then immediately leave the Hull Editor and quit the game.
It’s the only way to safely avoid what happened to you this time.[/size]
The only reason the editor went public at all is because Cliff happened to mention that he uses it for his own purposes, and it’s therefore nowhere nearly polished and de-bugged enough for heavy use. The veteran modders leaned on him and begged him to release it; warts and all. I think some of us have regretted that more than once.
The hull editor’s not reliable. It’s very convenient – when it works, that is – but it’s not that great of a substitute for hand-coding the textfiles yourself. Proceed with caution. What good is an electronic assistant that can’t be trusted to not flush your hard work down the toilet?
While it’s true that hand-coding takes much longer, it’s also true that hand-coding is 100% reliable. Good modding should not be done in haste, anyhow; that just encourages sloppy results and poor gameplay quality. I’m NOT saying that you should not use the Hull Editor – it’s a wonderful time-saver – just make sure that you use it intelligently. It will choke if you try to modify more than one hull per editing session, and I would hate to see your ship data get corrupted needlessly.
Regardless of which way you choose to proceed, good luck to you.
Yes; GIMP and Paint Dot Net. Both are really good - and free - graphics editors which will handle .dds files with ease. Which one happens to be the “better” program depends upon who you ask around here. Some modders have pretty strong opinions on this subject. PDN is Windows only, but GIMP offers Windows, Mac and Linux versions.
I’ve already got Adobe Photoshop with the .DDS plugin, I got the graphics down, I just need some utility that modifies text files without having to do it manually.
Then you’ll be waiting forever. For directly linking starship hull sprites/graphics to a .txt, there is no such animal. Oh, there’s a major need for one, though; I agree fully with that! You’d best get cozy with the Modding 101 guide and open a text editor.
I hear you. Make the enforced slower design pace your ally instead of making it your enemy, then. Don’t dissipate your energy on trying to crack barriers that are beyond all modders’ reach (i.e., the permanently buggy & erratic nature of the hull-editor part of the game engine).
Since going faster is mostly impossible without the hull editor, flow around the obstacle instead – reserve your energy for applied creativity. That’s where it can be put to the best use. [size=115]Quality takes time[/size].
I have found that he in-game editor works just fin for me. It has thrown a fit twice and that was because of bad data in the file. I copy paste a lot form other ships. Save and close often if i go into the in-game editor i do one thing save, and then exit the game. That why that one change is going to be save on exit, or if crash i can redo it relatively fast. Otherwise i risk losing half an hours worth of work or more.
I should be releasing the first version of the mod by the end of the month, I may or may not have all of the original races of the game done by then.
I am getting some good progress on the feds, will get alot of more done the next ten days, since weekends give me an extra couple hours to get this done.
Oh! Finally the compilation mod is coming ^^, but I’m afraid I have to bring you bad news about using my mod, The 3xper1ment4l era.
That mod is really unfinished and the content I released is only a fraction of what I had planned for it, so I think you shouldn’t be adding it here for now in case I ever update the mod. Remember that most of the sprites in there are made by Eich so I’m only pointing out that the code files could change with updates and shouldn’t be used as they are yet.
After some thinking, I think I should put off releasing ANYTHING until I finish the entire mod, or, at least the full game’s races, including the expansions, so sorry guys, no release in 2 days, I should have the entire base mod done by Christmas though, I will give an update or two every month.
I project I will be entirely done with the entire mod at around May of next year, 2012.
I had to use the Exposure control instead, which is strong medicine. The attached pic here shows what adding +5.30 exposure did in the effort of trying to make the hull visible. Alimarin, I’m afraid that the original hulk image is beyond saving, mate. The hull is somewhat visible when seen on my display, but it’s still too dark. Let us know what this looks like on your display – if it seems much too bright, then your display needs some adjustment.
