Re-done PIEs

[kage]

the medium and large bodies may share pies, but are definitely not limited to sharing -- they can each have a unique pie.

[Hatsjoe]

the medium and large bodies may share pies, but are definitely not limited to sharing -- they can each have a unique pie.

the same counts for all other propulsions as well.

[Computerboy319]

True, but then I'd have to mess around in coding, which, while I'm perfectly qualified to do so, I don't want to mess around with until a later date. At the moment, I'm just working on replacing each pie, on a one-for-one basis, not yet on making new ones. It shouldn't be too hard to make the light bodies look more like fighters with VTOL added, the designs are based off of different fighters (I kind of screwed up with the Viper, it was supposed to resemble an F-22 but I don't know how I ended up with what I have now)

[Watermelon]

True, but then I'd have to mess around in coding, which, while I'm perfectly qualified to do so, I don't want to mess around with until a later date. At the moment, I'm just working on replacing each pie, on a one-for-one basis, not yet on making new ones. It shouldn't be too hard to make the light bodies look more like fighters with VTOL added, the designs are based off of different fighters (I kind of screwed up with the Viper, it was supposed to resemble an F-22 but I don't know how I ended up with what I have now)

just curious,will the viper body look equally good with wheels/tracks/hover/any ground propulsion if it resembles F-22 with vtol propulsion? 

[kage]

True, but then I'd have to mess around in coding, which, while I'm perfectly qualified to do so, I don't want to mess around with until a later date.

no code necessary -- modders have been able to do that since day one (obviously without access to the source code).

just curious,will the viper body look equally good with wheels/tracks/hover/any ground propulsion if it resembles F-22 with vtol propulsion? 

i experimented with that a while back, and it's something of a catch-22: if you want to make a vtol look as good as possible, you have to modify the body to look sleek, which makes it loose the bulky look that goes better with the ground propulsion. the most apparent solution to this is to include the "chassis" in the propulsion pies, as well as making the chassis pie (at this point only displayed in the body selection phase of the design screen) small enough that they are contained entirely within the specialized-to-propulsion versions of the chassis. at this point, the issue is confusion: if you make one version of each body for each propulsion type, it becomes much more difficult to visually identify the unit as there are 4 different models for every body. as this point, it might look good, but it was about as much work as (and is as evil as) a display driver written in cobol.

in the end, if you want things to look as good as they can, the best option is a total conversion mod with source changes that alter the design screen so that the propulsion is the first component selected, and that the each chassis has only one propulsion type associated with it. this would also eliminate all of the problems found above (no need for an individual chassis pie, much less confusion since each chassis only has one appearance).

UPDATE: the f-22 has horrible maneuverability (the thrust vectoring on the f-22 doesn't make it have "wicked maneuverability", but just bumps it up to "borderline usable"), and armament aside, would get scrapped pretty quickly by most fighters. deal with the f-22 is that it has a tendency to kill the enemy at 300 km and then return to base, so it rarely has to worry about getting slaughtered at close range. you're right, though, it does look very sleek (a necessity for stealth aircraft).

[Computerboy319]

Well, new updates!
This is the new bug, but I don't think I'll keep it this way. When I decide to alter it, I'll do that, but until then, this'll do.


And that second picture gives you a highly pixelated view of the new assault gun. I also probably will not keep it this way:

It was designed to accomodate the fact that the Heavy MG and the Assault Gun share the same turret PIE. I'll re-do the assault gun one day, probably soon, and design it's own turret to boot, but just like this bug, this'll do until then. I know you hate the plate. Deal. I'll remove it later (I personally like it, I think it gives the turret a sense of back-front balance)

Uggh...I'm really not liking this assault gun. I'll work on drawings for a new one tomorrow.
Come to think of it, why am I working on this? I need to get T1 finished before I can move on...oh well. By the by, I've come across an odd problem...the twin assault gun. Uses the turret pie trhmg.pie, and the muzzle pie gnhmg1.pie However, I've been unable to find out where they both are. I know it's in 1.10, so it should be in at least one of the wdgs in 1.10...but I've undone every WDG that comes with Vanilla WZ (on CD-ROM, no less...I have two copies.  ) + 1.10, and I can't find it anywhere.

[Watermelon]

I wonder if you can remove the teamcolor from the propulsion,imo the whole droid will look alot better if each body has its own propulsion pie/textures.

[Hatsjoe]

I wonder if you can remove the teamcolor from the propulsion,imo the whole droid will look alot better if each body has its own propulsion pie/textures.

If you don't have knowledge of pie slicer: just use any picture editor, open the texpages and manually copy paste the preferred texture area over all the other team colors. So the game will actually render another part of the texture but since that area is equal for all teams it will look the same. There are 2 other possibilities: the first is by using pie slicer to edit the pixel area that is used for texturing a model. Just make pie slicer use the same area for each team. and third: if you know how to edit the source you could probably disable team colors somehow. Dont have any idea about that though.

[kage]

er... no pie is *forced* to use team colors, and conversely, any pie *may* use team colors/animation (it'll have a different effect based on which game entity "owns" the pie (scenery, projectiles, or vtol propulsion effects will use the animate indefinitely, explosion effects will animate once, and unit and structures will stick to one frame in the animation based on their team)... if you change the poly type to normal, it'll always display just one texture, and will use slightly less memory than the animated poly type, which supports procedural textures (including teamcolors). if you want all teams to use the same texture coords, just save yourself the confusion and the ram and change the poly to a normal textured one.

source code mods are definitely not necessary to remove teamcolors from the game (just edit all the pies), and while cloning the textures definitely will work, it's not a "clean" approach, so if you make a mod, make sure you don't distribute those texpages unless it's intended that certain teams look exactly like certain other teams (a ww2 mod might do that). for everything else, editing the pie achieves the effect.

[Hatsjoe]

er... no pie is *forced* to use team colors, and conversely, any pie *may* use team colors/animation (it'll have a different effect based on which game entity "owns" the pie (scenery, projectiles, or vtol propulsion effects will use the animate indefinitely, explosion effects will animate once, and unit and structures will stick to one frame in the animation based on their team)... if you change the poly type to normal, it'll always display just one texture, and will use slightly less memory than the animated poly type, which supports procedural textures (including teamcolors). if you want all teams to use the same texture coords, just save yourself the confusion and the ram and change the poly to a normal textured one.

source code mods are definitely not necessary to remove teamcolors from the game (just edit all the pies), and while cloning the textures definitely will work, it's not a "clean" approach, so if you make a mod, make sure you don't distribute those texpages unless it's intended that certain teams look exactly like certain other teams (a ww2 mod might do that). for everything else, editing the pie achieves the effect.

Aah yes that's right i was thinking for a moment that the game decided on which models to use team colors. But it's all in the pie itself. aaah well, makes things alot easier.

[Watermelon]

what I meant is a texture-independant teamcolor,it's just a bit odd to use textures for different team colors,I think a decent teamcolor manager should simply fill the 'teamcolor polygons' with specified color,rather than using the 'frame' of a 2D sprite in a texture page...

[Computerboy319]

True, but unless you put in support for different shades of one color representing different shades of a team-color, it's impossible to make color-keyed teamcoloring not look flat and painted-on. This way, you can still have team-coloring, and have little pipes and ridges and vents and stuff on it.

By the by, how is partial transparency achieved in WZ? I don't think it's color-keyed (like full transparency) so how is it done? Can it be inserted into a PIE or do I just have to designate something as smoke? And, again, my above question...where are trhmg.pie and gnhmg1.pie located? I can't find them in the original WDGs (vanilla + 1.10) I know where it is in mp.wz, but I can't edit those even when I alter .png to .pcx

[DevUrandom]

By the by, how is partial transparency achieved in WZ? I don't think it's color-keyed (like full transparency) so how is it done? Can it be inserted into a PIE or do I just have to designate something as smoke?

Transparency is done via textures, I think. Just use the alpha channel of the PNG.
If PIEs support RGBA colored vertices, you could try to use that, too.

[kage]

Transparency is done via textures, I think. Just use the alpha channel of the PNG.
If PIEs support RGBA colored vertices, you could try to use that, too.

wz seriously supports translucency using the alpha channel of png textures? it used to be that any color that was pure green (0, 255, 0) would be considered "fully transparent" by warzone -- to be backwards compatible, all the converted png's would need each pure green pixel to have a 100% alpha value before you can safely remove the "palette keyed transparency" code from wz's source to replace it with true alpha support.

[Giel]

True, but unless you put in support for different shades of one color representing different shades of a team-color, it's impossible to make color-keyed teamcoloring not look flat and painted-on. This way, you can still have team-coloring, and have little pipes and ridges and vents and stuff on it.

Well as long as you use a gray-colored area on the texture and designate that as to become team-colored it should be fairly easy to calculate team colors from that.