I had a few questions about creating terrains and drawing shadows, to start, I am curious about what .grps exactly hold the terrain tiles? I know where to find doodads, but not sure what are the right files to modify if I want to change a basic tile.
Secondly, does anyone have tips for drawing a building's shadow? Any particularly effective, yet quick techniques? In the mod I'm working with, we have many buildings since there are about 7 factions all planned to have up to 11 buildings including turrets and supply structures a faction.
Responsible for my own happiness? I can't even be responsible for my own breakfast
The tiles are not contained within GRPs. They are in a collection of files that you can find under the "tileset\" directories in the MPQ. There are a bunch of files called <tilesetname>.cv5, <tilesetname>.vf4, etc that should be extracted to a directory, and then you can use a program like PyTILE to export the tiles and edit them. The file "tileset\<tilesetname>.grp" contains the graphics for the edges of the creep (but the actual creep tiles are part of the tileset). All of the "tileset\<tilesetname>\*.pcx" files are the various color palettes used on that tileset.
When creating a building shadow, I typically duplicate the building layer in Photoshop, fill it with a solid color and then skew it slightly. I don't really have a good suggestion for numbers, I just tend to go with what "looks right."
all i am is a contrary canary but i'm crazy for you i watched you cradling a tissue box sneezing and sniffling, you were still a fox
If you're making doodads, I recommend a lot of meticulous drop-shadow tooling, as seen in the video above.
If you're just making units or structures, you don't actually need to make the shadow. Find a shadow entry in images.dat and point it to the same grp as the unit's, setting the recolor to shadow.pcx. Then offset it appropriately in iscript.
@Pr0ngo, We'll work on that shadowing method you mentioned below sometime soon. If it works out, it will save me a ton of work. However, does it only work on sprites that replace sprites already in the game? For example, does it work on a Terran barracks redesign while not working on a completely new building that isn't replacing anything in the game?
Good tutorial about doodads.
@Voyager, where can I find that program? Is it somewhere on SEN?
Thanks for the help once again to both of you.
Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jun 28 2017, 3:40 am by Augustus Valium.
NimoStar -- plus most of the human APM is just spam clicking APM inflation
[08:47 am]
NimoStar -- the thing with the "*12" thing is completely misleading. The AI isn't using two control groups, it can use each of those actions to command a single unit individually and issue different commands to each single unit.
NudeRaider shouted: Oh_Man Artosis hasn't caught on how devastating the perfect focus fire is. With the mutas he was like "the Mutas always seem to have less hp than against a human". But he didn't notice that the flock he had selected always just had one muta that was hurt. Same with the wraiths here. He's talking about how valks+wraith is gonna destroy Pluto's valks, then 5s later he's dumbfounded the human player's air is just gone and he never figured out why. And for some reason didn't even think to go back and look at the battle.
Artosis hasn't caught on how devastating the perfect focus fire is. With the mutas he was like "the Mutas always seem to have less hp than against a human". But he didn't notice that the flock he had selected always just had one muta that was hurt. Same with the wraiths here. He's talking about how valks+wraith is gonna destroy Pluto's valks, then 5s later he's dumbfounded the human player's air is just gone and he never figured out why. And for some reason didn't even think to go back and look at the battle.
