[StargateSpankyHam]

How does one go about making those primary weapon icons, as seen in the weapon selection screen? How difficult is it to make these? And what programs/utilities will I need? Can this be done in photoshop?

[FreeSpaceFreak]

Extract one of the gun anims in sparky.fs2->data/interface (IconCirce.ani for instance), split it up into frames. Draw your own gun, make some differently coloured versions of it, similar to the frames, and save them with the same palette and number. Then use ANIbuild to turn the separate frames of your gun into an ANI and table it into FS.

[Spoon]

.ani&.pcx are bloody awful formats
it reads only green 0, 255, 0 as transparant. So 0,254,0 is going to show up as bright green.
I tried making primary weapon icons (in photoshop) but never really managed to make them look good so I gave up and started using primary weapon models instead.

[Nuke]

they arent so bad really. here are some tips that i use whenever i have to make icons. i use photoshop 7 (none of that cs bull****) so heres what i do

make one icon in 24 bit color it should be greyish white in color and a black background.
use you can color the icon by creating a new layer on top of the icon. fill it with solid color of the desired shade. set the layer to multiply and modulate transparency as needed.
get the palette from an existing ani frame (exported as pcx with aniview) and save it as a microsoft pallette *.pal, and not *.act (act doesnt work for some reason).
go back to your icon and go to image->mode->index, set pallette to custom and load the pal file. this should also flatten the layers.
and finally fill the back of the image with solid green (there should be only one shade available), make sure it doenst fill in any undesired pixels (do this after converting to indexed for best results).
save all frames as pcx indexed. number them appropriately and convert.

hopefully some day the coders will add support for full color icons.

[StargateSpankyHam]

I extracted Circe.ani to work on - but how does one go about splitting it into its four constituent frames?

[JGZinv]

Use ANIVIEW32 to open the ANI file, then in the menu (or buttons) there is a Save Frames feature.

[StargateSpankyHam]

Uh, for some reason, the descent network gives a 404 error when I try to access the page. Does anyone have a working link where I can get ANIVIEW32?

[JGZinv]

I doth believe, if you use the FSO installer aka Turey's Installer, and just have it download the "Tools" only, you'll
get everything you need.  http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php/topic,42854.0.html

[StargateSpankyHam]

There isn't a 'tools' only option anywhere on the installer. I hoped it would let me modify my installation, but it did not.