Hard Light Productions Forums
Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => The Modding Workshop => Topic started by: IronBeer on January 02, 2011, 07:26:32 pm
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Listen to this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkIjF0cO6x0&feature=related) to get into the right frame of mind for this announcement.
Mentlegen! I am happy to announce a major breakthrough- the head animations featured in Starlancer have, at long last, been successfully converted to the .ani format, ready for use in your missions and campaigns!
Get the resource pack here! (http://www.mediafire.com/?tqlxpcqa86bvgsu) (Mediafire link, .7z archive, ~14.4mb)
Disclaimers and Technical Notes:
*A lot of hurdles had to be jumped and I needed to get help from quite a few people to make this modpack available. For those reasons, there are two main entities that should be credited before (and, if anything more than) me. The first is the user "adoxa" over at the Lancers Reactor; if not for his patient assistance, these animations would be forever locked away in the .fm8 format. Secondly, Microsoft Corporation (once Digital Anvil, but alas) deserves credit as well- the animations are their work, after all.
*Included in the modpack, under the "extras" folder, are a handful of .fm8 animations that did not convert for some reason, along with some of the tools I used and a brief overview of my procedure. Getting the bum animations converted would be something of a "bonus goal" for this project, but is by no means necessary.
*There are some duplicate animations; this release only focuses on including all the converted animations I could manage, so "meh" for now. If desired, I can put up a "revised" release later.
*The .anis are 99% guaranteed to work in-game (all animations were personally tested in-game), but I make no guarantees that all of them will look good. Because the original animations were in full-color, some of them may not have fared too well during the transition to grayscale.
*For those who care, the procedure I used to liberate the .fm8s was as follows:
1. Used fm8tobmp (custom program, provided by adoxa), to spit out a series of bitmaps.
2. Had Berberus Image Resizer... well, resize the bitmaps to 160x120.
3. Renamed each set of bitmaps, one at a time, with Batch File Renamer.
4. Copied and renamed the first bitmap of each set so that AniBuild will take the eventual .pcx files. (Steps 3 and 4 were the rate-limiters :ick:)
5. Ran the bitmaps through IrfanView to result in grayscale .jpegs.
6. Ran the jpegs through IrfanView to return to bitmaps.
7. Made the bitmaps into .pcxs with BRIGHT and a custom batch file.
8. Built the ani.
Whew! Enjoy!
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Wow! Downloading now. :)
EDIT: I found a very good use for these ANIs after a decade. :drevil:
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:yes: :yes: :yes: Great work..
One thing I don't understand tough - all this converting. Irfanview can batch modify .bmps and turn them into greyscsale or .pcx, so the bmp->jpg->bmp->pcx route seems needlesy complicated.
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Can Infranview's batch converter apply palettes, though? When I make my anis I convert the base image into greyscale with it, but I have to apply the HUD palette manually.
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Did you try Galemp's Bright Texture Converter (http://www.freespacemods.net/download.php?view.520) for palette reduction? I used it for custom cbanis and it worked great.
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Very nice! Great succes :D
and wow, starlancer had a ****load of pilot ani's
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Have you noticed how weird the death anis are? When I played StarLancer, I thought they were real or, at least, plausible... much better than those seen in FreeSpace. What I see now are innatural flames appearing on the screen. Ugh.
Also, I can see anis which are never used ingame, or at least aren't under normal circumstances.
EDIT: Obviously, it doesn't mean I do not appreciate IronBeer's effort. If I remember well, there even was a team working on a SL mod for FreeSpace, and those guys had a few models ready. They would have loved to see these anis. :)