 October 5, 2007 - 1:31pm | Refer to: Screenhots. I'd like to see the ship icons be made all new and pretty :-P What you're currently using look like scans of the chits provided in the Knight Hawks boxed set. Although nostalgic and cool, they're not up to par with the clean and commendable interface you're developing. If you give us the resolution and file type, I'm sure one of us could come up with a new set of tiles for you. I'd of course want to see them look similar to the chits from KH, just clean and crisp and new. Simple squares with colored backgrounds with ship silhouettes and names would be great - just like you have now. 3. We wear sungoggles during the day. Not because the sun affects our
vision, but when you're cool like us the sun shines all the time. |
 October 5, 2007 - 5:50pm | That sounds great to me. I personally have no artistic ability at all -- all the images in the screenshots are either SF scans or Creative Commons/free images. Any help with graphics would be great. PNG files at 32x32 pixels are ideal. Why not have the ship images with a transparent background? This way the program can drop down a colored square and then the image over it, giving players more options on what colors they will be using. We might want to reserve Sathar green, UPF blue, and pirate red though. |
October 5, 2007 - 7:13pm | If we make the backgrounds transparent (using tranparency in PNG
format) you can then add the necessary colors and text through code?
That sounds great to me! How are the hexes rendered? Are they a single static bitmap, or are they rendered in a tiled form? Or are they just one hex image with a repeated background (like the hexes in the side bars of this site)? If they're discretely rendered, then there would be no reason you'd have to create a colored square around a ship through code. You could just have the entire hex colored appropriately (blue for UPF, red for pirate, etc.) - but of course this depends on how you're rendering them. I assume you can rotate the ship among the hex faces.... or do you need six renderings of each ship? 3. We wear sungoggles during the day. Not because the sun affects our
vision, but when you're cool like us the sun shines all the time. |
October 5, 2007 - 8:50pm | The hexes are rendered through code. Rotation is a simple matter that I already have working. I'm going to look at changing the transparency to a color in code. If that doesn't work I can always fall back on dropping a colored square first then the image. It's a hack, but it should work. I don't want to color the entire hex because there could be multiple ships in one hex. Of course, w00t already started a thread on that one. |
 October 9, 2007 - 3:32pm | Did you read my Shades of Motion in 3-D article in Issue #6? It allows a third dimension to the mapping. Also, I was working on a library of black & white chits using the higher quality version of the classic images as well as the ones from my Starflight article. Bill could transform them into .gifs with transparent backgrounds for me. |
October 9, 2007 - 7:04pm | I did read it, and I liked the 3-D aspect. I also liked the scaling down, which I think would be great for fighter-centric scenarios. What fighter pilot wouldn't want to strafe a battleship with assault rockets? I'm focusing on the core rules now to keep the scope of the project managable. Once the core is done add-ons should follow. |
