[esarai]

So I made a HUD shield ani in photoshop, saved everything as a pcx, compiled as a standard one-keyframe animation and set my fighter to have it as a shield icon.  Now no shield icon appears in game when I fly this fighter.  What did I miss?

[peterv]

i can think of two things:

     1. Wrong directory
     2. Wrong color palette

[esarai]

Directory is solid.  C:\Games\FreeSpace2\Overclock\data\hud

Do explain the color palette thing.  I haven't seen anything about how the palette is supposed to be configured.

[Spoon]

Palette issues usually only shows up (at least, if you guys are using the same anibuilder as me) when you try to make the .ani. If it didn't then it probably isn't a palette thing.
Did you try different types of animation yet? Like a mainhall one (every frame a keyframe).

[esarai]

I got no warnings on palette issues... they were all desaturated, and the image was made in BW, so there shouldn't be too many issues... unless the "transparency" option in Photoshop CS2 caused an error.

I didn't try mainhalling it after the aniview program played each frame forward and then back again.  The ones we see inside the vps only play in one direction.

I'm going to see if a new set of images can resolve this, if not, I'll try mainhalling.

[Spoon]

You can turn off the loop/rewind thing in aniview
I suggest you just give it a shot, its little effort and it might work.

[esarai]

Alright.

I'll also force a custom palette for the image, because photoshop keeps changing it for each segment and it's causing adjustment errors.

EDIT:  It's still doing its weirdness.  Identical palettes, all frames keyframed, and nothing.  Although I did notice some strange artifacts in the ani--areas that are pure white became black.

[General Battuta]

I've experienced the exact same thing trying to make an .ani, with pure white areas becoming black.

[Talon 1024]

You need to use a special greyscale palette in order for your shield ANIs to appear correctly in FSO.
You also need to make sure that they are 112x93 pixels in size and that they are in the proper directory.

I don't have photoshop, so I can't provide the palette in photoshop format.  This archive contains the palettes for Shield and Comm Head ANIs in GIMP format.  If you have GIMP, you can place these in your C:\Documents and Settings\<Windows user name>\.gimp\Palettes\ directory, then you can convert your greyscale images by using the shield ANI palette as a custom palette while doing the greyscale-indexed conversion.

[Galemp]

Thanks, Talon.

Yes, it's not enough for your ANI to be grayscale, it has to have a very specific palette so that it can be colored by the HUD gauge preferences.

Your best technique is to open an existing HUD ANI, extract the frames, paste your new frames into the old ones (which should preserve the palette,) then save and rebuild it with the new name.

[Spoon]

This is the palette I use
http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?tnfjovtyyag
Which I got from an old thread.
It works for talking heads, probably for shield .ani's as well though I never tested that.

[esarai]

Thanks for all your suggestions!

Talon 1024, yours worked!  It was a palette error.  I think I'll go do something on the wiki to help modders out in the future and provide a link to the resources.

Thanks a lot guys!  Expect a special delivery soon.