The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

Some of you might remember the old wallpaper I made with ship-info screens (it should still be somewhere on the PONF) - where I basically used other people's 3D renderings for the SC2 ships.  Well, now I've done one better - fresh new screens for the SC2 ships, made from scratch in glorious 8-bit color, specifically in the style, size and color palette of the SC1 screens, so that they'd mesh together better.

Since the 3DO ship-info videos are absent from UQM, I'm wondering if these could be used in their place (I've tried to stick to canon as much as humanly possible, except for some not-so-serious text labels, which did exist in the SC1 screens too, after all).  But that's up to the team, of course.

Click here to see all the graphics along with the text overlays (requires javascript)

(http://209.200.79.64/temp/sc2/compilation.jpg)
(http://209.200.79.64/temp/sc2)
What do you think?  Comments, flames, whatever... bring it on!

Amazing.. Very impressive how you managed to keep the style of the old ship portraits..

Only tiny little gripe I have is with the Chmmr Avatar's perspective, whish seems a bit odd (perhaps, the 'Tractor beam generator' is causing that?)..

Hmmm, you're probably right now that I look at it, though I think it might be the left-side wing that's in the wrong... I'll try to fix it later.  Thanks!

These are awesome.

Good job !

I like the pictures. As a ship selection thing it doesn't work though; using "next" and "previous" to find your ship is just too cumbersome.

Simply put, the pictures are way too good not to use in UQM. The only question is how do we shoehorn them in.

Amiga_Nut is working on replacements for the ship spin videos (I've seen Mycon, Orz, Druuge and Androsynth so far); one option would be to have a sort of info browser like VileRancour suggests, accessed by pushing the Menu-Special button, which would dump us in VileRancour's interface with the selected ship shown and, from there, you could step through the ships, return to the ship selector, or view the shown ship's video.

Well, it's not meant to replace the ship selection popup, just to enable further navigation without going back a screen if you're already there.  You're probably right though - I'll see if I can work ship icons into it somehow...


Yes - or perhaps the choice could be made available through the setup menu, whether you want to use the ship-spin videos or the info screens (just like the PC behavior vs. 3DO behavior options).  Having both sounds cool, though.
At any rate, thanks for the comments so far, everyone!

That would work.

Hey, can we somehow work these screens and/or Amiga Nut's 3D video clips into the main game as well? You know, at the starbase's shipyard. A spritzed up Super Melee screen is good by me, but 90% of the people playing this game do it for the singleplayer campaign and may not even notice the new features.

Really? I would've thought that most people who play the full campaign do have to practice with a bit of Super Melee, at the very least (well, unless they let the computer do their battles)... But what do I know - when I first played SC2 years and years ago at a friend's place, we didn't even realize there was a full campaign game until we randomly decided one day to run something else than melee.exe...  :P

Update -- Fixed the perspective issue with the Chmmr

(Just goes to show what happens when you do 3D by eye without any modeling..)

By the way, if there is interest in putting this into UQM, maybe some changes should be made on the info overlays, such as changing the font (say, to SC2/UQM's "Small Font", to make it less cluttered and to avoid having to insert a completely new font into the game), and perhaps removing the ship name, since it already appears at the top of the interface and would be redundant... just throwing it out there.

Very nice!  I couldn't say which I like most.

Give the Druuge some dark regen rate bars. They do have a special, after all.

That is all kinds of awesome!

Looks very cool...nice job!

Hasn't this been done before? I'm sure it has. Did it get lost when PoNaF went down for a while?

They all look nice, but my favourite is the Traddash. It makes it look much more like a real ship rather than a delightful little rascal.

Heh, hard for me to pick my own favorite as well... although I'm partial to Orz, Thraddash and Kohr-Ah I guess (the latter one was by far the hardest/most time-consuming to make, almost all the effort was dot-by-dot pixel-art)...

Aha!  I knew I'd made a mental note to fix something about the Druuge, just couldn't remember what - fixed now.
(The special's regen rate is a full bar because technically, if you hold down the special button, it's slightly faster than the Chmmr's even with the refire delay)

Like I said in the initial post, I did do something similar before in the form of a wallpaper, but the SC2 ships on that one were just pasted from other people's 3D renderings (with some ugly additions on top of that)... maybe I'll just make a new one with these new screens and send it to the PoNaF dudes.

The Slylandro Probe picture has some of its background nebulae cut off
see: http://mooses.nl/temp/slypiclines.jpg (http://mooses.nl/temp/slypiclines.jpg)
Maybe a slight image bug there, but I thought I'd let you know.. ;)


http://starcontrol.classicgaming.gamespy.com/sc2/shipspecs/

Very nice! Excellent work. I especially like the attempt to make these look like the original SC1 ship spec images.
I have only one minor request - mainly it's a little pet peeve aggravated by arguing with one rather obstinate and rude person: Can we please not use the name "Terawatt Laser" for the Avatar main weapon. As far as I know, this isn't found in the canon and seems to only be based on the fact that it's twice as strong as the VUX Gigawatt laser (so then shouldn't it be called a "2-Gigawatt Laser"). There is a canon name that we could use - "Heavy X-ray Laser", from the 3DO spin video.

What, didn't you notice how the chmmr weapon does 1000 damage per frame?

I remember a discussion about this way back, either here or on the SCDB. Maybe even on the old SCDB. I think the general consenus was that "Terawatt Laser" was simply made up by the guy who made the old ship spec images that have been linked here already. I don't think it's a very big issue and "Heavy X-Ray laser" is a bit of a mouthful, but I suppose that if UQM is to be kept strictly canon Terawatt has to go. If anyone is really passionate about it, I suppose you could check with TFB and ask their opinion.

Awesome work. Couldn't have done it better myself. I want to see this in game.

I noticed that you have the Kohr-Ah stats setup like the Ur-Quan stats. Nice touch.

The other ships looks nice as well. Nice job reducing the color to 8-bit. You'd swear it came with the original game. TFB would be proud.

These are great, excellent job :)
If you would allow it, I would really like to use them in UQM:XNA :)

Yeah, fantastic work. Like others have said, it's very much in the spirit of the original images, I'd say it's spot on!

--Eino

Excellent Job on the images! so good in fact, it warranted me posting on the UQMF, which pretty well never happens. Do you mind if I use the images on PNF, as part of the PNF MKII Im working on?.  Credit would be given of course.

Woah - your monitor must have some impressive gamma. ;) Thanks - fixed.

....Maybe the the VUX have a continuous-beam laser and "gigawatt" represent average power, while the Chmmr's is actually a nanosecond-pulse laser which would make "terawatt" merely the peak output? ....No?  *cricket chirps*

Well, you're both right.... though if accurate nomenclature is an issue, then an X-ray laser would technically be invisible (in addition to being a bit of a mouthful). Any nice, punchy name would do the trick, I guess.
(By the way, if it does get added to the game, then the SC1-style info display sequence could probably be controlled by a script, which would mean that the text need not be set in stone.)

Thanks, and sure! I'd be honored. :)

Scott - last I checked, I think the (crappy) old ones I had made were still in the PNF's "ships" section, so you could probably replace those, haha.  If you want me to send the images without the interface etc. around them, let me know.

We don't know exactly what the effects of being hit by a laser are. It could be that a thousandfold increase in power is required to achieve a twofold increase in effective damage.

...

It's not canon. Ditch it.

It's funny you should mention that - I used to work with femtosecond-pulsed lasers (which got into the terawatt range) to produce coherent x-rays (ie a pulsed, table-top x-ray laser). If we're really trying to be accurate, then we wouldn't be able to see any of the laser weapons (yes, my friends all refuse to watch star wars with me).

But honestly, I fully realize that my previous argument with a rude person has jaundiced me a bit to this debate. Really, I'm not a canon-Nazi ("No SuperMelee for you!!!!"). I truly do love the "flavor text" you've added (the thraddash turning signals - hilarious). Some of the changes to the texts in going from the old images to the new images appeared to me to be a conscious effort to come more in line with canon, and so I suggest this change in that same spirit. I also don't think "heavy X-ray laser" is much more of mouthful than "terawatt laser" - it's only one syllable difference. But regardless of whether I can sway you or not, my concern over this one point pales in comparison to my accolades and praise to you for a job well done.  ;D


From my experience with lasers, I'd say it's the other way around since the higher power gives access to a nonlinear interaction regime with multiphoton absorptions (freshman physics classes lie, electrons can absorb more than one photon at a time - under certain conditions) and higher ionization states.

Fair enough, the terawatt is gone. ;D  How about simply "X-Ray Laser"?

By the way - regarding the page with the images..... I've just upgraded my Firefox to v3.0, and noticed that a brilliant new "feature" blurs the images to death.  Apparently, if you scale your image by applying a style - which I did, to give a nice 2x zoom - then FF3 applies a basic scaling filter, which is very bad for pixel art, and best of all, cannot be turned off.

So, apologies to FF3 users - the blurriness was not intended... try to view the page with something else for best results.

"X-Ray Laser"? No! What are you doing?! That name is terrible. Who cares if "terawatt laser" is not in line with real life physics? The game is halfway between cartoon and science fiction.

Yeah, I'm gonna have to join the dissenting opinion here.  Terawatt laser is a much better name.

Also, the art is really awesome.  I rarely get excited over fan stuff but these things are just beautiful.

Exactamundo! The whole point is for the names to be sciency sounding, but still wrong. Or at least not really plausible.

Terawatt laser sounds cool to me, and i'm pretty sure ive read that somewhere official. manual maybe?

I'd keep the "heavy", to reinforce the fact that the laser is really powerful, but your abbreviation is fine.

Woah Vile, so that's what you've been doing all this time? ;)

I recognize the Supox from the ol' "graphics thread" for ship sprites. Well done, indeed!

May I suggest a roll-over icon strip, somewhat like the "filmstrip" option in MS Window's explorer which allows you to see a bunch of image thumbnails on a strip and the selected one enlarged in the middle.
The icons can be very small - just enough to identify the ship it represents.

Actually, it could STILL be "Terawatt LASER", it just means it's less efficient - even scientifically speaking.

Example - a 5kg hammer with an elastic rubber handle (can bend) and a 5kg hammer with a harden handle. Now go break someone's windshield. Both hammers potentially do the same damage, but you have to use much more force with the elastic handle to actually deliver.

[edit - ha, missed Elvish's post up top. sry]

Those were 3 lines on useless physics where the main question is - which sounds cooler? - go with Terawatt LASER  imo ;)


P.s. if we're talking science already, it should be GAMMA-RAY or something, seeing as that's much more potent than X-RAYs on the electromagnetic spectrum (see e.g. http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/science/know_l1/emspectrum.html).

Well, I've actually started working on this a year or two ago, until I ran out of steam (right in the finishing stages, as always) and went back to it only last week, haha.  So yeah, the Supox image in that thread was from this little project - good memory ;)


How about this (instead of pick-exit-next-previous)?  I simply used the smallest ship icons I could find in the game content (XXXmicon.1.png).  Prehaps scrolling across icons could bring up each ship's image on the bottom screen, pressing Fire would bring up the info sequence, and pressing Fire again would select the ship, with the "X" icon going back to the fleet screen without selecting.... or something like that.

(http://209.200.79.64/temp/sc2/!meh-icons.png)

Anyway, as for the Chmmr, I do agree that "Terawatt laser" sounds cooler.  But if this does end up in the game somehow (wishful thinking?), then it would be up to the team to decide...  that, or asking TFB to wield the Ultron for an answer. ;)

+1

Unless, of course,


is true.

I really love what you are doing here. Don't know if I can think of one complaint.

I think we misunderstand one another, so maybe I didn't explain myself clear enough. Both names, "terawatt laser" and "X-ray laser" are equal amounts of technobabble. Neither is more in line with real life physics than the other. Terawatt lasers do exist (http://lasers.llnl.gov), as do x-ray lasers, though neither in a form similar to the Avatar's laser. If it were only a question of what sounds cooler, I too would go with Terawatt (actually 1.21 Jigawatts would be even better). But the difference is that "X-ray laser" appears in one canon source (the 3DO video), while terawatt does not - though I'm open to being wrong on this point. Now, if you don't mind, I need to get a new flogging device - the horse blood on the one I'm currently using is making it hard to hold onto...

I think that this is quite a bit more user-friendly than your original arrangement.

Edit: removed image from quote.

I like that.

Wow! Very nice work. I’ve been beaten to the proverbial punch I see.  :o Oh well, I’ll just keep working on my animations and see what happens. It’s funny because I’m actually using those sc1 pictures in the CGI design phase. Are there any legal reasons why they can’t be used in UQM I wonder? Anyway… cool stuff… Total canon!!! Bravo!!

Thanks, man.  And don't be dissuaded from working on your videos, they're all kinds of awesome so far (and if we're talking about either of these things making it into the game, I'd say your project has the better chance anyway, since videos did exist in the 3DO version. ;)  Having both would be awesome though...)

I like this quite a bit better myself, as well.  I've updated (http://209.200.79.64/temp/sc2/) all images to have the icon ship menu instead of the buttons.

(Also, the images themselves are now enlarged x2 in advance, to work around that brilliant new Auto-Blur nuisance feature in Firefox 3.0.)

I suppose you've tried HTML's width/height properties?

Oh, awesome work by the way. :)

Yeah - setting width/height properties in HTML or CSS is what causes the problem.... Firefox 2.x resizes the image without resampling it, so it looks nice as long as you enlarge by an integer factor, but FF3 steamrolls all over the poor picture with its heinous scaling algorithm which you can't disable and smudges it to oblivion.

End of off-topic rant....  anyway, thanks. :)

I had another look at the ship info screens...a close look... and I must say again - TOTALLY FREAKING AWESOME!!! I love the Pkunk, this really needs to be put in the next release of UQM.

I really like them! I especially like how they look like original SC2 pics.

I'm myself working on human captain potrait for Nicholais UQM mod
http://forum.uqm.stack.nl/index.php?topic=4022.0 (http://forum.uqm.stack.nl/index.php?topic=4022.0) (which seem unfortynately quite dead project)
For me the hardest part is original SC2 look. I think that I should use original sc2 palette like you, but wondering where to get it?
Did you simply took it from some original sc2 ship potrait?

I love these, but two nitpicks:

Orz Marines I reckon would look tons better if you shaded out the Orz inside and gave it an ominous glow coming from within rather than you can visually see the gribbly Orz inside. There's also another battlesuit variation somewhere too I've seen which has a fatter battlesuit with claws, so I don't know which one might be considered canon, the one from the SC Roleplaying Guide or the art what I saw which was previously on PONAF's Orz page but seems to be not there anymore.

And the Kohr-Ah sun at the bottom seems to have something about it but that's about it.

Well, the Orz marine is based on the little drawing that appears in both the SC2 manual and the Roleplaying Resource Guide... as far as I know that's the only detailed graphic of an Orz marine in any official SC material, so it's as canon as I could find.

Actually, the palette I used is from SC1, not SC2, since that's where the original ship screens came from, and the 'look' I was trying to preserve.   I got it by taking screencaps of the DOS version.

You could use the same method to get the SC2 palette - the thing is, SC2 did not use a fixed palette; sometimes there are palette changes even within the same comm screen (e.g. Melnorme, Slylandro).  However, even in these cases, some of the palette colors remain constant, since they're used for the interface.

So, what I would personally do in this case, is look at untampered DOS screenshots of some comm screens, figure out how many colors always stay the same (and therefore, belong to the interface and not to the alien picture), subtract this number from 256, and that's how many colors I'd downsample my image to, in order to get the same "look and feel" of the other comm screens.

Oh, and... if you really wanted to be pedantic, then this palette would also need to be converted to 6 bits *per channel* (a 'true' VGA palette, where the possible values for R, G, B are 0-63), instead of 8 bits per channel (0-255), which is what you'd get with most of today's programs.   I don't have any idea how to go about doing that, though.  ;)

To add to my post above:

I just checked with the comm screen images in UQM, which I guess are identical to SC2.  As I guessed, the palette varies from image to image... and so does the number of unique colors - it ranges from 50 to 140 (most are around 110-120).

So, if your image is photographic (or drawn/painted with a lot of different hues and colors), try downsampling it to something like 110-130 colors.  If it's drawn/painted with relatively few hues, try lower numbers.  This should give a nice SC2 comm screen feel... (provided that you change to the final resolution *before* you downsample.)

Thanks! I think that I take colors from thus original comms to get same "color space"and use 128 colors palette to limit the amount of colors.

One thing I did forget is animating! I'm not wisard in that thing, so I here is someone who is, I'll gladly let him to do that.

Unfortynately last post by Nicholai, who did start this project is from March 15, 2008, so the project might be dead... :(

By the way, I remember that Orz marines are yellow? ???

Edit: fixed my poor english :P

The Orz marines change color depending on their state, whether chasing an enemy or returning to you (at which point they were green IIRC). Basically do them whatever color you want, the in game graphics were purely iconic.

Hello new loading screens!   :)

(http://www.bwoot.com/xna/images/loading.jpg)

Kickass loader!

Sorry for reviving a very old topic, but shouldn't this (very cool) project get stickied?

-=PakoPako=-