I found a guy to do at least some of the graphics for CTC, but he doesn't play Nova. Therefore, he won't know what sizes and formats to make everything. Right now it looks like he is going to be doing ships, so what I need to know is what formats and sizes the ship info box pict, the shipyard pict, and sprites should be. I also need to know if there is any special steps required. I have Blitzen, so I can take care of that part once I have it in my hands.

He uses 3DsMax 2.5 and Photoshop. Will those work for the flat graphics and the sprites?

Shipyard main window PICTs and outfit PICTs are 200x200 pixels. If you want Nova-style target graphics, you should probably ask him to send you square shipyard graphics both with and without backgrounds, to make it easy to convert the background-less one to a target graphic.

Ship info window PICTs are 600x400 pixels.

Sprites can be any size, and don't even need to be square. I would recommend running one of the Nova sprites (possibly a fighter with banking frames) through DeRle, copying the PICT resources into seperate files, and sending them to him to show him how to lay out a sprite. If you want your ships to be angled to match Nova, they should be rendered with the camera at an angle 45 degrees off vertical.
Also, sprites do not need to have just 36 frames- most large ships in Nova have 72, and any number will work up to 360.

@joshtigerheart, on Jun 8 2006, 08:11 AM, said in Graphic Formats:

He uses 3DsMax 2.5 and Photoshop. Will those work for the flat graphics and the sprites?

Almost certainly. If he's familiar with those programs, he shouldn't have any trouble at all.

There are several points about ship graphic creation that I'm not well acquainted with, so you will need to ask someone else about things like render angles for shipyard PICTs, post-render processing of sprites (there are special steps here), and anything else I have forgotten. Also, this thread tells about the lighting angles for sprites in Nova.

Edwards

One thing you can do after rendering is use LASIK to make the ship look a lot better in-game. It's quite simple:

- Render the sprites at double the final dimensions (four times the area - that is, 36x36 would be 72x72).
- Open the sprites in Photoshop and apply Filters > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask (amount: 300%; radius: 1.0; threshold: 0).
- Scale the image down to the final size (obviously, half the rendered dimensions).