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Author Topic: New SC1-Style Ship Info Screens - All Done!  (Read 29197 times)
meep-eep
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Re: New SC1-Style Ship Info Screens - All Done!
« Reply #45 on: July 14, 2008, 01:56:59 am »

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.

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.

[...]

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

Edit: removed image from quote.
« Last Edit: July 14, 2008, 08:48:08 am by meep-eep » Logged

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Re: New SC1-Style Ship Info Screens - All Done!
« Reply #46 on: July 14, 2008, 04:01:21 am »

I like that.
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Re: New SC1-Style Ship Info Screens - All Done!
« Reply #47 on: July 16, 2008, 01:10:30 pm »

Wow! Very nice work. I’ve been beaten to the proverbial punch I see.  Shocked 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!!
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Re: New SC1-Style Ship Info Screens - All Done!
« Reply #48 on: July 16, 2008, 10:59:18 pm »

Wow! Very nice work. I’ve been beaten to the proverbial punch I see.  Shocked 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. Wink  Having both would be awesome though...)
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Re: New SC1-Style Ship Info Screens - All Done!
« Reply #49 on: July 16, 2008, 11:16:21 pm »

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

I like this quite a bit better myself, as well.  I've updated 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.)
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Re: New SC1-Style Ship Info Screens - All Done!
« Reply #50 on: July 17, 2008, 02:07:26 am »

(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. Smiley
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Re: New SC1-Style Ship Info Screens - All Done!
« Reply #51 on: July 17, 2008, 02:46:12 am »

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. Smiley
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Re: New SC1-Style Ship Info Screens - All Done!
« Reply #52 on: July 17, 2008, 04:10:54 am »

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.
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Re: New SC1-Style Ship Info Screens - All Done!
« Reply #53 on: August 05, 2008, 02:18:55 pm »

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 (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?
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Re: New SC1-Style Ship Info Screens - All Done!
« Reply #54 on: August 06, 2008, 05:33:23 pm »

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.
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Re: New SC1-Style Ship Info Screens - All Done!
« Reply #55 on: August 06, 2008, 08:59:05 pm »

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.
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"Space is not large and it is not small. It does not live and it does not die. It does not offer truth and neither does it lie.
"Space is a remorseless, senseless, impersonal fact."
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Re: New SC1-Style Ship Info Screens - All Done!
« Reply #56 on: August 06, 2008, 09:23:34 pm »


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?

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.  Wink
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"Space is not large and it is not small. It does not live and it does not die. It does not offer truth and neither does it lie.
"Space is a remorseless, senseless, impersonal fact."
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Re: New SC1-Style Ship Info Screens - All Done!
« Reply #57 on: August 07, 2008, 01:44:36 am »

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.)
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"Space cannot be measured. It cannot be angered, it cannot be placated. It cannot be summed up. Space is there.
"Space is not large and it is not small. It does not live and it does not die. It does not offer truth and neither does it lie.
"Space is a remorseless, senseless, impersonal fact."
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Re: New SC1-Style Ship Info Screens - All Done!
« Reply #58 on: August 07, 2008, 03:04:49 pm »

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... Sad
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Re: New SC1-Style Ship Info Screens - All Done!
« Reply #59 on: August 09, 2008, 04:34:09 pm »

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

Edit: fixed my poor english Tongue
« Last Edit: August 09, 2008, 04:36:29 pm by zarren3 » Logged



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