Since I got into the online FS community, and started with the user campaigns and Fredding my own stuff and downloading mods and even dabbling in a bit of modding myself, I have noticed one sad thing. Several times now I hvae downloaded some beautiful new ship to fly, fast and sleek, or lumbering and deadly, or anything else the modders have imagined, only to find that these lovely works of art are desperately lacking a proper ship selection ANI for the briefing loadout screen.
I can understand why. My only foray into ship modding was making the Nahema a player-flyable ship, complete with loadout screen and icon, but I stopped short of making an entire ANI file for it because it just seemed like more work than it was worth.
The hard part isn't really so much getting the images of the ships to put in the ANI file, it's that blasted grid in the background that makes it such a pain in the rear end. So yesterday I decided to do something about it. As the light of dawn breaks, I have produced what I hope will be a boon to modders who want to give their ships that truly polished feel.
Basically, I've reproduced blank copies of the background grid for all frames used in fighter and bomber ship selection ANIs. I haven't taken all the work out of making a ship ANI, but with these grid backgrounds, it can reasonably be done now. In a nutshell, all that is required now is for the modder to plunk down images of his ship as seen from different angles on top of the grid in each frame, and he has a
quality ANI. I've submitted this to HLP, so it ought to be available in the FreeSpace Tools section soon (or somewhere like that
), and can also be downloaded
here. I've written a detailed set of directions to go with the files, which took perhaps even longer to write than the files did to create, but should be quite helpful.
Now I'm going to bed!
P.S. If anyone wants a very nicely done (if I do say so myself) player-flyable Nahema bomber, you are welcome to it.
