How do I make custom ships using EVNEW?

I really feel bad about starting a new thread for this, but i've been searching quite literally all day, and havent found what i needed.

I'm just learning to make plugins, and made some very simple ones so far, but I want to make a custom ship. i have no problem making the 36+ pictures needed, I just cant figure out what to do with them in evnew...my iBook is at apple being repaired, so its the only option I have. i assume i have to import the images into the pict resource, but I really dont know anything further from there.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, be it direct instsructions or if you could point me to a thread that focuses on what to do in evnew to use the custom ship sprites.

To make me feel worse, i just realized i should have posted this in the EV developer section..if a mod could move this there, that'd be great.

This post has been edited by Mythran : 12 April 2006 - 08:31 PM

This belongs in the dev board.

Try modifying and making variants of existing ships first.

i have made modifications to existing ships, and made variants already, which is why i'd like to make my own...i'm pretty good in lightwave, which i got through my college(graphic design major), so all i need to do is know how to use the sprites in evnew to make my own ships

btw i know this belongs in the dev section..i stated that in an edit to my previous post

Moving...

thanks slagblah, sorry again

First, you need a sprite and a mask. The sprite is the 36+ images as you described; the mask is essentially the same thing, but tells the game which parts of the ship should be transparent. Specifically, white means show whatever is in the sprite and black means hide it. The point of this is to not show the huge black square around ships. For an example, try exporting one of the rleDs in a Nova Ships file.

There are two common methods for creating the mask. The first is to take your sprite grid and use the magic wand tool (if applicable, turn off anti-aliasing and set tolerance to 0, or do whatever is necessary to select exactly one color) to select the black area. Copy, create a new document with a white background, paste, and save.

The other method, which sometimes gives better results but requires you to go through the laborious process of laying out the grid twice, is to open your model, set ambient lighting to 100%/white, and rerender with antialiasing off.

Once you have both images, create a new rleD in EVNEW. Select "Import..." from the File Menu (I think) and then...I have no idea. I'm sure a Windows user could help you out more.

thanks...so i need one image and one mask of the 36 images together?

You need something like this (scroll down a little for the Pegasus and its mask).

This thread seems to be moving towards solving the issue you raised in your PM to me, Mythran, so I'll just add my comments here. (Glad you found the John Kerry tutorial useful, though!)

I don't use EVNEW, so I don't know what kind of input file it expects for sprite RLE creation, but I expect Zacha Pedro is right -- you probably neeed a grid of images all in one big image, like the Pegasus one ZP just linked to.

As to how to make the grid image from your set of 36+ pictures, if you were on a Mac you'd be able to use the "Sprites" apps from w00tware. On a PC, one way to go would be to use copy and paste to import each of your little images into a big blank one, using the the "snap to grid" and/or "snap to guides" features in Photoshop or a similar program to make sure you get your rows and columns lined up perfectly. If you need it, perhaps someone else can provide more detail or another method....

thanks a lot...i just finished my first, really crappy ship. i wanted to make sure i knew the whole process before spending the time to make a really nice ship model and discovering i couldnt figure out what to do.

yea..what i did was loaded the .mov i rendered into imageready, sized it down, transferred the psd to photoshop, then made my image/mask that way..it worked great, just a little tedious. i'll include a copy of what i've made so far if anyone is interested, its nothing out of the ordinary, just trying to see if i could do it...its a .rez file, so mac users will have to convert it.

i have all of the relevant images loading correctly for my ship, with the exception of the info image....how can i link this to my ship so when i click info in the shipyard it shows up? i noticed theres no info pic for the kestrel either...

Attached File(s)

• my_ship_so_far.zip (61.44K)
  Number of downloads: 37

This post has been edited by Mythran : 13 April 2006 - 12:17 PM

@mythran, on Apr 13 2006, 12:02 PM, said in Custom Nova ships in EVNEW:

i have all of the relevant images loading correctly for my ship, with the exception of the info image....how can i link this to my ship so when i click info in the shipyard it shows up? i noticed theres no info pic for the kestrel either...

Nice work! You're making fast progress. If I were making it, I might turn that ship around, giving it a tail instead of a nose....

View PostZacha Pedro, on Jul 13 2005, 06:33 AM, said:

There are quite a number of resources that are hard-linked to shďp. For one, a ship uses for its appearance the settings defined in the shän resource with the same ID as the shďp. This means that variants have to have different shäns (but with the same data) at different IDs matching the shďp IDs. However, the shäns (that are lightweight) can all point to the same Rlë8/D sprites (that are somewhat bigger). The target picts (that are red scanlines in the Nova scenario) are found at PICT ID 3000+shďp index. The 100100 shipyard pict is at PICT ID 5000+shďp index, and the small 3232 icon is automatically generated from it. Notice that these two do not need to be copied for all the variants of the same ship, since if more than one shän uses the same base sprites, then the engine recognises the corresponding ships as having the same appearance and therefore will reuse the target PICT and shipyard PICT from the one shďp with lowest ID.
Lastly, the 600*400 image that is shown along with the ship characteristics is not hard-linked (though to avoid ID collisions you should follow the habit already taken and give the PICT an ID of 20000+shďp ID), but instead is indicated by the Graphic field of the ship dësc! Speaking of that, the ship desc is at ID 13000+shďp index, and the ship hiring desc is at ID 14000+shďp index (don't forget to fill the Graphic field of the hiring desc as well, with the ID of the 600*400 PICT, for the picture to be shown with the ship characteristics in the hiring dialog). I think that's all...

You might want to click the little arrow by ZP's name at the top of that quote and read the rest of his guide to the ship resource. It may be a hard slog, but you'd learn a lot.

Thanks for the feedback

this isnt actually as hard as i thought it was going to be..it was really overwhelming at first, but taking it in small steps, it can all come together quite easily.

that quote from zacha was really helpful..its exactly what i needed...i'm about to work on another quick ship, i was thinking like a quick low quality millenium falcon/tie figher..lightwave is pretty quick, so i'll post what i have of it here once i finish, most likely later tonight.
i'm really glad that evnew has help boxes when you mouseover a specific box, giving instant help and more understanding.

getting that first ship done was the hardest thing..now i know how everything integrates, so making a second will be cake...now i have to tackle the harder stuff

This post has been edited by Mythran : 14 April 2006 - 01:52 AM

I forgot to mention: you don't need that RLE of just the mask. Unless you are using PICT sprites (which are of dubious usefullness in EVN 1.0.9), you don't need to leave a separate mask resource in your plug.

Since you've got a black fringe showing around your model in its RLE that will be visible when it passes in front of planets, if you were using EnRLE or MissionComputer on a Mac I would be advising you to "tighten" your mask (for example, by applying Photoshop's "minimum" filter to it, though that's a crude method). But EVNEW seems to deal with things in a way quite unfamiliar to me.... Why is a black fringe visible in the RLE of the mask?

This post has been edited by Dr. Trowel : 13 April 2006 - 04:33 PM

@dr--trowel, on Apr 13 2006, 05:33 PM, said in Custom Nova ships in EVNEW:

Since you've got a black fringe showing around your model in its RLE that will be visible when it passes in front of planets, if you were using EnRLE or MissionComputer on a Mac I would be advising you to "tighten" your mask (for example, by applying Photoshop's "minimum" filter to it, though that's a crude method). But EVNEW seems to deal with things in a way quite unfamiliar to me.... Why is a black fringe visible in the RLE of the mask?

i just didnt take the time to clean it up as well as it should have been..i was just really testing this to see if i could do it, not to make it perfect on the first try...i'm working on a much nicer model right now, which i'll render and spend more time making sure the mask is more perfect. i really just wanted to see if what i was doing was going to work, so i threw it up there, and tested it, and thats what came out of it

@dr--trowel, on Apr 13 2006, 01:33 PM, said in Custom Nova ships in EVNEW:

...Why is a black fringe visible in the RLE of the mask?

I haven't seen the image, but I would guess that Mythran started with a non-one-bit mask image. If EVNEW treats all not-pure-black pixels as white for the purpose of masking, it would probably have the effect you are noticing.

So, when making masks, be sure that the mask image only contains the colors black and white, with no shades of anything else.

Edwards

@edwards, on Apr 14 2006, 02:15 AM, said in Custom Nova ships in EVNEW:

So, when making masks, be sure that the mask image only contains the colors black and white, with no shades of anything else.

ooooh, you know what? that is probably the right answer..i didnt feather at all when making the mask, but i didnt check to see whether any shades of gray existed..i'm going to load up my mask, fix it, put it back in, and see...i figured it'd just make them less transparent..i guess i was wrong

(edit) I made sure everything was pure black in my mask, deleted the old rle, made a new one w/ this mask, and still no change...i'm including images of the ship and mask(/edit)

Attached File(s)

• testship1small_layout_mask.gif (9.65K)
  Number of downloads: 59
• testship1small_layout.gif (42.57K)
  Number of downloads: 65

This post has been edited by Mythran : 14 April 2006 - 02:09 AM

If by "still no change" you mean that you still have a black border around your ship, perhaps try using "minimum" on the mask, as I mentioned earlier -- the results may be crappy, but at least you'd learn whether fine-tuning the mask can improve things. You also should know that I'm being exceptionally picky here -- even the sprites from EVN itself have a few stray black pixels showing around their edges. If there aren't too many, you never notice 'em.

Here's a disturbing possibility.... Does EVNEW actually use the black and while image you give it, or does it just look at the (color) base sprite and build its own mask from that, assuming that all 100% black areas should be masked? (That would actually be quite stupid -- you wouldn't be able to have any true-black areas on a ship, since they would behave as holes.)

@dr--trowel, on Apr 14 2006, 06:37 AM, said in Custom Nova ships in EVNEW:

If by "still no change" you mean that you still have a black border around your ship, perhaps try using "minimum" on the mask, as I mentioned earlier -- the results may be crappy, but at least you'd learn whether fine-tuning the mask can improve things.

i appreciate the pickyness i put the plug here to be critiqued, and thats what you're doing. Yes i did mean that i still had the fringe, and i just tried the "minimum" filter....does it put the darkest colors as black? or something similar? it made my ship look like crap like you said it might, but i tried it anyway(with a backup of course). I dont know if you wanted me to minimize the mask or the ship, so i minimized both...with horrible results..the fringe actualy got worse, with a "noisy" black pixel radius of like 4 or so pixels

What's all this about taking a movie and manually copy/pasteing the frames and laying them out in a 6x6 grid?

Isn't there a series of tools to do that for you? Called Sprites, I believe. It's downloadable in the add-ons section.

With regards to your graphics, you'll notice that the lighting in various flavors of EV all come from the top left. You also might want to consider using an angled lightsource. If your light is coming from directly above, your model will have no variation in appearance when rotating, and might as well have been a static image that's shown at different angles. This will tend to look more artificial as it doesn't appear to interact with the environment.

@mythran, on Apr 14 2006, 10:57 AM, said in Custom Nova ships in EVNEW:

i appreciate the pickyness i put the plug here to be critiqued, and thats what you're doing. Yes i did mean that i still had the fringe, and i just tried the "minimum" filter....does it put the darkest colors as black? or something similar? it made my ship look like crap like you said it might, but i tried it anyway(with a backup of course). I dont know if you wanted me to minimize the mask or the ship, so i minimized both...with horrible results..the fringe actualy got worse, with a "noisy" black pixel radius of like 4 or so pixels

Ack! No! Just run "minimum" on the mask, not the sprite. "Minimum" goes through every pixel of your image and assigns it the lowest color value it finds in the surrounding pixels. If you set it to a radius of 1 pixel on an image that only contains black and white, therefore, for each pixel it should look at 9 pixels and set the middle one to black if any of the surrounding ones are black. This has the effect of making a mask with smaller white areas, which should get rid of the black fringe that is showing through the mask from your base sprite. (This method also might blunt the sharp nose on your ship, though, which is what I had in mind when I said it might make your ship look crappy. I keep hoping someone else will jump in here and explain more sophisticated methods for getting rid of the fringe.... I was just trying to get you started on the issue.)

@desprez, on Apr 14 2006, 11:40 AM, said in Custom Nova ships in EVNEW:

What's all this about taking a movie and manually copy/pasteing the frames and laying them out in a 6x6 grid?

Isn't there a series of tools to do that for you? Called Sprites, I believe. It's downloadable in the add-ons section.

Ah. What you're missing here is that he's working on Windows. And he's been taking advice from someone (me) who is on a Mac, which is proving to be a singularly suboptimal situation.... If an actual EVNEW user would care to jump in, that would help.

@desprez, on Apr 14 2006, 11:40 AM, said in Custom Nova ships in EVNEW:

With regards to your graphics, you'll notice that the lighting in various flavors of EV all come from the top left. You also might want to consider using an angled lightsource. If your light is coming from directly above, your model will have no variation in appearance when rotating, and might as well have been a static image that's shown at different angles. This will tend to look more artificial as it doesn't appear to interact with the environment.

Yes. Also, the camera is at an angle to the plane of rotation of the sprite, which is why you can see the face of the engine exhaust ports on most ships. It's also why you can see the vertical side of the Pegasus' disk:

The camera angle is sometimes said to be 45 degrees from vertical, but I often think it looks more like 30 degrees.

This post has been edited by Dr. Trowel : 14 April 2006 - 12:17 PM