A plea for help

[Harlan]

Hi,
I've had people send me artwork before, and that's been really helpful. I've been able to make many sprites easily as a result. But now I've decided that the best artwork by far for my WW2 era units would be the graphics from the East Front and West Front games. I don't have the game, but if someone could send me the graphics it would be amazingly appreciated. All one would have to do is find the folder with all the .bmp files in them, zip them up and send them off to: harlant@earthlink.net.

Please please please!

[Morgoth]

Harlan
The full set of units in Western front zipped was still over 4MB.

Can you E-mail me the units you want?
By the way I found a good old 3d mobile Scud missile launcher (its not animated yet). Interested if I animate it?

[Harlan]

Thanks a ton! I replied in more detail by e-mail, I hope you got that.

[WesW]

Harlan,

I followed your instructions for making the Stockade improvement, but I have a few problems.

First, I made a crude paint shop graphic, and converted it to a tga file. However, when the pic comes up in the game, it is blank- just a black square.

Also, if I want to make new icons for the Stockade and fortification tile improvements (what you see on the terrain map), what size do they need to be, and what would be their file names (the improveicon files all end in 062 for the Stockade, and would end in 50 for the fort.)?

Also, in the improve.txt file for Stockade, there is a line for improve_description. Right now it still reads city walls. Do I need to change it, and what other file do I need to edit so that it works?

Finally, I tried opening the sprites, and received a message saying they were an unsupported file type. What do I need to do to fix this?

BTW, all the text files seemed to work ok.

I'm sorry to bother you with all this, but I can't find these "How to" instructions written anywhere. Maybe if an advanced modder like yourself could put step-by step instructions for these things in the Modification section, it would encourage more people to get involved in this.

[WesW]

Harlan,

I solved the problem with the tga files. However, I noticed that when I R-clicked on the Stockade line in the production tab, nothing came up. I believe the statm062.txt file should have appeared here. I checked the file, and it appears to be ok. Any ideas as to what might be happening?

[Paul]

To get the stat*.txt files showing up you must add a line to script.slc. Check out the file, look for lines starting with helpbox (I think, I'm not really sure, it should be something like that) and use them as examples.

IMPROVE_DESCRIPTION doesn't do anything as far as I know so you can just leave that as it is.

[WesW]

Thanks, Paul

They sure didn't make it easy to change stuff in this game, did they?

[Harlan]

WesW,
Sorry I can't help much with your questions. I have only tried to make the actual unit sprites, I haven't made the Great Library entries or other text and graphical things to make the unit fully functional. And most of what I know on the making of the actual sprite is in the help file I wrote on the subject. If you learn more, send me what you learned and I'll add it to that file.