Animated Textures for UFOs [CODING HELP NEEDED !!!]

[MCR]

I have no opinion because I can`t see anything in this jpegs. I like the main idea, yes.

Maybe this picture brings you some light ?
(just some experiments with the new flares)

You could tell me how to tell the screensave-system to use png instead of jpg if you want better screens 4 the future...

[H-Hour]

You could tell me how to tell the screensave-system to use png instead of jpg if you want better screens 4 the future...

I posted this earlier:

You can set screenshot format to PNG by executing set r_screenshot_format png.

[MCR]

I posted this earlier:

Thanx, H-Hour, sorry, I did not get it somehow ?!
Also I started a new technique - Because of my inability to find stuff in the WIKI, I now print out those interesting pages
It's maybe just my laziness, because if I know that there are people with an answer I simply ask
But when I got the answer I will not ask the same stuff again

Learning never stops...

[MCR]

& H-Hour, sorry if i was a little rude in my comments yesterday, but sometimes it can be 'a little lonely' feeling in this forum here & I sometimes do not understand why people are not answering if they know the answer & can help

So I ask here once again: Are you willing & able to help me exchange those textures in the 3 big U.F.O.s if I deliver the textures & the description which ones have to be replaced ?
Then we could finish this stuff here together & I would have time afterwards to help you polishing your map if you like me to

I will start getting my already finished stuff to Mattn now & I hope he commits it to trunk soon

[H-Hour]

So I ask here once again: Are you willing & able to help me exchange those textures in the 3 big U.F.O.s if I deliver the textures & the description which ones have to be replaced ?

I probably won't work at the speed you'd like, but if you prepare the textures I or someone else can get them swapped in time for the 2.3 release. It would make it much easier (and therefore more likely to get done quickly) if you spell out very clearly which textures are to appear in which locations in which UFO (ie - which map files).

Also, I know you're eager to get everything completely done, but smaller changes are more likely to get implemented. If you prepare the textures to appear in one UFO on one map, and then prepare a brief on what's to be changed, that will be much better for the person doing it than being faced with a list of dozens and dozens of changes to be made across dozens of maps.

If you get impatient waiting, though, I'll tell you that swapping out the textures on the UFOs is actually something you could do pretty easily without needing to learn almost anything about Radiant. You'd only need to get to grips with the most basic controls.

Side question to those who have built more of UFORadiant's features: is there any way to track prefabs across maps so that changes on a prefab effect the maps where it's used? My guess is no, but thought I'd double check.

[MCR]

I probably won't work at the speed you'd like,

I hoped that you are motivated to see the new stuff in action !?

but if you prepare the textures I or someone else can get them swapped in time for the 2.3 release. It would make it much easier (and therefore more likely to get done quickly) if you spell out very clearly which textures are to appear in which locations in which UFO (ie - which map files).

I would make screenshots with the exact locations of all the textures + add a description which is to be exchanged with which one, but that means work for me, that I only want to do if someone is willing to help me with this
I already made a feature request regarding this subject on sourceforge, but I can't reach the server @ the moment so I will post a link to this here later...

Also, I know you're eager to get everything completely done, but smaller changes are more likely to get implemented.

That's why I uploaded 7 new flares yesterday, as 1st step

If you prepare the textures to appear in one UFO on one map, and then prepare a brief on what's to be changed, that will be much better for the person doing it than being faced with a list of dozens and dozens of changes to be made across dozens of maps.

That is why I want to finish documenting everything, so the code will be easy to understand...

If you get impatient waiting, though, I'll tell you that swapping out the textures on the UFOs is actually something you could do pretty easily without needing to learn almost anything about Radiant. You'd only need to get to grips with the most basic controls.

Side question to those who have built more of UFORadiant's features: is there any way to track prefabs across maps so that changes on a prefab effect the maps where it's used? My guess is no, but thought I'd double check.

This is one of the questions regarding this subject, that also were floating through my mind & I have no experience using UFORadiant, know just the absolutely basics regarding this tool & I really have no time for long experiments, when I know there are UFORadiant professionals around who could do this stuff in 20 minutes for all 3 of the U.F.O.s, with no questions left unanswered & I would need hours & hours of testing to get it done
The benefit of this work done would be that there would be different animations for every panel & every monitor in all the big U.F.O.s on every map ! The bomber for example has one monitor-texture used throughout the whole ship, so there can be only one material definition defined for this monitor with the effect that all monitors in the ship would have the same animation running, we could just change the configuration for other maps, but not for each monitor separetely...

[Mattn]

Side question to those who have built more of UFORadiant's features: is there any way to track prefabs across maps so that changes on a prefab effect the maps where it's used? My guess is no, but thought I'd double check.

no - i'm sorry - you have to replace all those brushes in all affected maps then.

[MCR]

no - i'm sorry - you have to replace all those brushes in all affected maps then.

Now we know for sure, that this will be not made in 20 minutes. 
Nevertheless I will create the textures for exchange, we can do that @ any time in the future then...
At least all the buttons colors will be matching each other throughout one ship. This means some kind of 'easier design' for the first phase of the new layered animations...

[MCR]

Status Update:

The first test version of the new animations & the first *.mat testfile were sent to Mattn for review.

[H-Hour]

Cool! Hopefully it will get put in trunk so we can check it out.

[Mattn]

one thing i should note here - i will not commit every single texture of the archive you send me. a lot of the textures are almost the same just with a different color. that is something you can control with the color attribute of the material system.

[MCR]

@Mattn:
You can also leave the old animation frames in tex_ufo untouched for now.
Just overwrite all other files with the new tex_ufo ones I sent you.
We can safely delete them later, so that in the meanwhile (until all .mat files are done) the old animations will still work. (I saw you used one of the old animations for alienbase also...)

I designed the ufo_tex folder to contain ONLY textures for the mappers for the future & ALL animation frames will go into tex_ua, maybe we should even make subdirectories for displays, buttons, screen-overlays, screens, skins, fx, damage-skins,... there for easier navigation through the thousands of frames

If we add support for multiple .mat files per map, we could make different U.F.O.s land on the same map & bring more variety into the game 
Just another idea... 

[MCR]

one thing i should note here - i will not commit every single texture of the archive you send me. a lot of the textures are almost the same just with a different color. that is something you can control with the color attribute of the material system.

I know that. But I thought it would be much easier to keep a certain color-code, when mappers have the ability to surf through the frames & the filesize the 'reduced' frames need now is so small that I thought it would not matter, but would give everyone the possibility to choose the colors by comparing them without the need to code something like color 0.3 0.7 1.0...

[MCR]

Many of the animation frames are just played backward & almost all of the frames turn around after frame 8 to make a smooth loop possible...
I wrote all this into my feature requests btw.
We could save many frames by adding more code to the material-system...
But look @ the sizes of the animation frames. I reduced them down to almost nothing. But you can throw out everything you do not like of course  ...

[Mattn]

i just don't like to the idea to add content to the game which can be computed (very cheap)

i will look into the animation system of the material subsystem...