Brainstorming room for getting together for scens

[gemini]

Hey guys, Lets start posting ideas here for starting some more scenarios and maybe getting together as a team.

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Gemini

[MarkG]

well, I have been trying for some timenow to find the time do a ancient greek scenario. not anything special, just to get a greek map with the main ancient greek city-states as the nations
havent even dared to consider new units, or even actually placing the cities. it would be a "clean" start game

skorpion made a good map already, and I've found a map with enough city names, but have stoped there...
anyonw interested?

[Dogmatrix]

I'd help with the Anchient Greek Scen but I'm really busy right now, making things for Starcraft, Civ, Age of Empires. As well as designing a completly new game, sorry shouldn't worry anyone with my workload.
Anyway as you know I'm making a Fantasy Mod, and would be glad to let someone take one of the other Races off my hands, not humans cause I'm doing well with them .
Yeah, so if anyone wants to help me with this Mod I can give a few of my starting notes, at present in my head for the other races, and be very glad to have some help.
Dogmatrix
[This message has been edited by Dogmatrix (edited May 03, 2000).]

[Dogmatrix]

Hey gemini maybe I took the meening of your thread slightly wrong, so here is another reply.

I've got a large tech tree, about 30 techs, made up for a high tech mod but am not going to even think about using it until I finish my other. The tech tree has really cool stuff, like spacial warping and plasma weaponry, to mention two of the physics ones, and could be split up to make two races/civ sort of things, one that uses biomech mechanical units and another that uses higher physics units. If anyone is interested post a reply and I can send you the tech tree. Only problem is that it is being designed for another game, the not yet finished one, and so mightn't be able to be used, ie teleportation.

Anyway if anyone's interested reply and I'll see what I can do.

[Locutus]

Well, as I mentioned before in other threads, Age of Empire and Age of Kings graphics can be converted to CtP format. So far I've only been working with Age of Empire graphics but I think it will work for Age of Kings as well. I'll try to describe the procedure in such a way that everyone can understand it so it might be a bit too elaborate and simple for some (or maybe most) of you, but I hope to keep it understandible for everyone with some basic computer knowlegde (such as how to use Windows Explorer and open a file).
I'll say in advance I haven't figured out exactly how to make animations yet (the script that comes with every sprite needs to be adapted for animations and I didn't have the time to look into that yet, but that can't be very hard to do - famous last words ) but as far as the graphics are concerned all needs to be done extra for animations is that not only five (one for each facing) files need to be prepared, but a whole bunch of them. With about 40 or 50 files per animation-type (less for some types of animation), four or five animations-types per unit and about 60 or 70 units for AoE and RoR alone (not even including the heros), you can imagine I want to get all the help I can. Or just don't do animations or not do all units of course but it would be nice to do all units and fully animated, it would provide scenario- and mod-makers with over a 150 fully animated units from Bronze Age to Renaissance (or whenever AoK ends, I don't have the game myself, yet).
First I downloaded some files from the Age of Empire Heaven (a Gamestats Affiliate, so they can be accessed from Apolyton's front page) website, namely a DRS-extractor (to extract the compressed DRS files which contain all the AoE graphics), a SLP-convertor to convert the AoE graphics from their original SLP-format to BMP-format and last but not least some DOC-files that provide an overview of which graphics are in which SLP-files (as far as I can see these are named pretty random). I think there are several versions of all three items so you'll have to find out for yourself what you like best (I downloaded some at random and am still using those, there might be better programs out there that I haven't seen yet so I won't recommend anything, for the same reason I also can't describe how to install or use the programs, you'll have to rely on the accompanying readmes for that). Also I downloaded right here at Apolyton Harlan's graphic making guide which contains not only a lot of useful information on how to make graphics (you might want to read that as well as this post) but also a few very useful template-files that will ease the proces.

All the graphics for the units are in the same file, namely graphics.drs (both for AoE and AoE:RoR and probably for AoE:AoK as well). So unpack this file using your DRS-extractor utitily to a seperate folder (there's quite a few files in there so unpacking them in your normal AoE game folder will make a mess of it). Assuming you installed AoE and/or AoE:RoR in the standard folders the graphics.drs file(s) can be found in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\Age of Empires\data(2), where the AoE file is found the in the data folder and the AoE:RoR file in data2. It may be possible that the DRS and/or SLP utility you use doesn't make it necessary to extract the files before converting them to BMP, see the readmes for these utilities for how to convert the graphics to BMP in that case.
For the actual converting process, first check the doc-files for the filenames of the unit you wish to convert (there are seperate SLP-files spread throughout the archive for action/attack, moving, dying, decaying and guarding/idle and for some units, such as ships or villagers, even more types of anymation such as waving, heading or harvesting). For animations, convert all SLP-files that belong to the unit you want to convert to BMP-files using your SLP-convertor, for one or five facings you'll only need the movement animation. For each animation-type there are a bunch of (for us useless) text-files (about 40 or 50, I think it differs per unit and animation-type), an equal amount of graphics files and just as much shadow graphics files (although I think they do more than just add shadows, I didn't really figure that out since I don't *think* they're useful for us, but I could be wrong about that, they might come in handy when making shadows, see further), so you'll probably want to put put all these files in seperate folders as well.
Now open Harlan's GUblankMA1.0.psd or, if that can't be read by your graphics program, GUblank1.0.gif and all AoE graphics files you need. Open all the files you extracted and, if you do animations, prepare them all to be made into sprites. If you only want one or five facings (I'll assume now you want five), you'll have to open all graphics and pick one suitable graphic per facing (the differences between the graphics are pretty subtle so it doesn't matter all that much). For most graphics you'll have to start with mirroring them because CtP uses the opposite sytem compared to AoE in displaying the facings (see figure below). As you can see facings 2, 3 and 4 need to be mirrored and 1 and 5 can remain unchanged.

 CtP facings      AoE facings             * means that this facing doesn't really exist but is a facing that
      1               1                     is created automaticly by mirroring the facing of it's number,
   2* |  2          2 | 2*                  as you can see AoE uses exactly the opposite facings as CtP for
     \|/             \|/                    originals so three facings need to be mirrored to be used in CtP
  3*--+---3        3--+--3*
     /|\             /|\
   4* |  4          4 | 4*
      5               5

From now on it's all standard work that Harlan already described in his unit creation guide. I'll shortly repeat the procedure and give some tips for Paint Shop Pro 5 users. If you don't have PSP or Photoshop or different version of the program then Harlan or I use, the exact names of the commands and in what menus they can be found may be different but the procedere will largely be the same for your graphics program (if you're still using MS Paint: give it up ).
Past the picture in Harlan's template, you can easily do this by selecting everything (Selections -> Select All) and then narrow the selection to everything but the background picture by making the background color transparent (Selections -> Modify -> Transparent Color... and make sure the background color is selected as transparent color and tolerance is 0) and finally copying the selection (Edit -> Copy) and pasting it as a new layer (Edit -> Paste -> As New Layer).
Now move the graphic around in Harlan's template until you like the position compared to the white diamond (which is approximately at the same position as a terrain tile in CtP) and get rid of the white background, e.g. by using the flood fill bucket or, better, selection layers (for me this is always a struggle to get it right so I can't give a standard procedure, but Layers -> is used to select a layer and Layer -> Arrange and Layer -> View can be useful too) until you don't see the unit itself anymore but you do see the background and the layer with the white tile (with me it usually turns black spontaneously, don't ask me why) and merge these two layers (Layer -> Merge -> Merge Visible) and use floodfil to make the white tile black if it isn't already; now bring the unit back on top again so it is visible.
Then make an alpha channel (Masks -> New -> From Image... - if you're told you already have a mask and asked if you want to replace it, press Yes - in the window that pops up 'Source window' should be 'This Window' and 'Create Mask From' should be 'Any non-zero value', now press OK, then Masks -> Save To Alpha Channel... and if the Preview shows the picture in black and the background in white then press OK twice).
Finally merge all layers together (Layers -> Merge All (Flatten)) and save in tif-format (names should be GUxxMA1.0.tif to GUxxMA5.0.tif where xx is any number between 00 and 99 (e.g. 01 or 35) and 1.0 to 5.0 stand for facings 1 to 5).
Once all pictures for a unit are done (for one-facing units use File -> Save Copy As... to save the same facing under 5 different names because every facing needs at least one file) make a new folder in the Units folder of the Spritetool and give it as name a number between 0 and 99 that is the same number as your tif-files have (so if you called your files GU01MAx.0.tif, call your folder 1) and move all your unit graphics there (you can save the files here right away as well of course). Now use Harlan's template script file for the text file of your sprite (it should be placed in the Units folder itself - not the folder with your graphics but its parent! - and named GUxx.txt where xx is once again the number of your tif-files between 00 and 99), and if it isn't there already, copy the file makespr.exe to the Units folder and execute it: open a DOS window (e.g. via the Start Menu with Programs -> MS-DOS prompt), goto Units folder under the folder where you installed the Spritetool (I think the standard folder is C:\Program Files\Activision\CTPSpritetool\ so type cd "\Program Files\Activision\CTPSpritetool\Units") and type makespr -u xx where xx is once again a number between 0 and 99 representing the number of your graphics. Now the sprite will be created and the message Conversion completed succesfully will appear if the sprite was succesfully created. If something went wrong you'll get an error message like error in bitmap data. Pixel with no associated alpha you probably did something wrong with the alpha channels or forgot to merge the layers or something like that, if you get something like could not open '' you placed the mentioned file in the wrong folder or something of the like. If everything went alright you can exit the DOS-window with the command exit and you should find a file called GUxx.spr in the Units folder (Guess what xx stands for ). You can now rename it GUyy.spr where yy stands for any number between 0 and 200 (I could be off by one).

The only problem with the method I just described is that it uses the AoE shadows as CtP shadows and displays them as big black blobs (sorry Don, have to steal your name here - what this means is a little secret between Don and me ). Another option would be to remove the shadows and use no shadows at all. This involves quite some work and it probably at least as ugly (maybe even more ugly). A much more elegant option would be to create seperate shadow-files as well (maybe using the AoE shadow files in some way), but this involves even more work and could prove too difficult at least for a moron like me A fourth option might be (although I currently have no idea if this is possible, how this should be done and how much work it involves) to adapt the alpah channel for the normal graphics in such a way that shadows would still be transparent. Any thoughts on this?

Well, this should cover about everything, I hope I didn't forget anything important (that wouldn't be a first), but I'm kind of tired of this anyway (all in all it costed me a whole day to put this in writing - I'm a slow writer and English isn't my first language), so I'm going off watch some Star Trek reruns now Any questions/remarks/ ideas/etc. are welcome of course...

Locutus
[This message has been edited by Locutus (edited May 11, 2000).]

[skorpion59]

Locutus,

Thanks much for taking the time to spell all this out and giving the rest of us a jump in learning it.

I wanted to point out that I don't believe this works for AoK. The graphics.drs for AoK is 70MB compared to AoE's 12MB and the AoK DRS contains 4650 SLP files compared to AoE's 650. I downloaded multiple versions of all the Utility programs from AoE and only a couple from AoK. The DRS Explorer V11 and SLP Studio V17 would extract the SLP files without a problem, but that is as far as it goes. All the rest of the utilities are AoE based. I tried them anyway but they simply wouldn't work on the AoK SLP files. The vast majority of them just bombed out with errors. The most common problem was frames. The SLP to BMP would produce a BMP file as long as the frames were 25 or less. Unfortunately, most the AoK were 75 to 250 frames. Of the ones that went through the conversion, none produced an actual graphic which was usable or even viewable for that matter. More reading, looking & downloading didn't seem to help so I downloaded the AOE Trial and did the exact same procedure on those files and it all worked beautifully. This is a real shame since AoK seems to have 3 times the number of units and ships as AoE.

I don't have the Real AoE, I'm not graphically inclined and I have not really messed with this aspect of any game before so I might be totally wrong about this. If somebody else has got this to work with AoK, I would appreciate knowing which utilities (and versions) you are using.

[Morgoth]

Locutus
I might try and follow this through this weekend and see what the alpha problem is - or where you can simplify things. I use paintshop pro 5 and I ended up fidling quite a bit with alpha channels a couple of weeks ago while I was trying to get the smoke to fade out while adding waves to the ironclad unit.

Also, if you need an example set of code for a unit with animations and attack/death I posted something here ages ago or I can repost if you want.

[Morgoth]

Locutus
Try changing Harlan's template by making the background colours anything none black eg yellow and white or bright green (anything that can be selected later). Then do all the selections you said and do all the positioning and save the file. Reopen the file as 2 copies. For one copy you want to select the shadow that you can see (which is close to black)and remove it then colour all the background black and create the alpha channel. For the other copy you want to select all the shadow but this time flood fill the selected shadow black then inverse the select and floodfill all of that white (ie background plus the unit). Now create an alpha channel for this shadow by using the source opacity option not the 'any non zero option'. This creates an alpha channel that is completely black. Save this file and you now should have a correct shadow file.

Another option is to edit the alpha from the first image - but make sure its the alpha you are editing. Here you can amend the greyscale shading which causes the unit to go transparent (useful for smoke) but this needs a bit more care and its not so easy to see which bits of the alpha related to the shadow rather than the sprite.

Another point to note is that when it comes to seleting your shadow you don't have to be over careful between where the unit and shadow meet. A slight overlap is better than no overlap and all it does is put shadow on part of the sprite but its probably unnoticable.

[Morgoth]

Locutus
Got your note. Do what you must and good luck to you and your friends.

[Locutus]

Don,
Oh, that's too bad then. I downloaded the AoK demo (I don't have the regular game) and you seem to be right. I'll mess around with AoK some other time then and focus on AoE for now. Thanks for the info anyway.

Morgoth,
Thanks man, that is *really* usefull! I found your script in the archives, that'll save me a few hours of my precious time. The hints on the shadows are *very* much appreciated as well. I'm gonna have a good look at it all as soon as I get the chance (I first have some other stuff that needs to be finished up).

Locutus