I have been trying to convert my ship graphics into 100x100 pixel squares and other such square sizes for EV ResEdit documents. However, all my ships are not square. I try to trim them down in squares, but it is hard. The problem is that I always end up with a lot of black space on the top and bottom. Will this ruin gameplay? Is there something I can do? Does it matter at all?

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--ares
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What I do is make a 1000 by 1000 image and then copy the parts that I need. I paste it into Graphics Converter and get rid of the white border. Then I scale the image down to what I need.

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Mechanical engineers build weapons. Civil engineers build targets.
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Extra black space on the edges of each sprite will not harm gameplay, as long as the black space is the same on every sprite, and you account for it in your spďns. But you needn't excessive space, only enough to be comfortable that no piece of the ship will be cut off.
When you render your ships, make it fill just enough of the picture (and be sure that you are rendering them at 100x100, not resizing them post-render). The easiest way is to make a Quicktime movie in your rendering software (I think I remember you're using Mechanisto), then stick it into m2s.
You could also make a folder full of sequentially numbered PICT files (Mechanisto should do that for you) and use p2s. Either way, you can do it automatically. And if worse come to worse, you could always manually render each angle at 100x100 and number them manually.

-Matt

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Quote

Originally posted by ares1:
I have been trying to convert my ship graphics into 100x100 pixel squares and other such square sizes for EV ResEdit documents.

With the 100x100 squares I assume you're refering to the shipyard and com pics? For the shipyard especially I often find it useful is to resize and move the whole ship to position it optimally, leaving the camera where it is. You don't need to do this as much of the com pics; for them, change both the y and z camera values to change the angle of the ship in the image. For sprites, all you have to do is change the camera's hight until the front and back of the ship (or the two sides, whichever comes first) is nearly touching the edge of the pic (of course you need to center the ship, first...).