[mjn.mixael]

<MjnMixael> FFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU
<MjnMixael> I can NOT get these shield ANIs to work right
<MjnMixael> F THIS DAMNED GAME

It's 2 AM, I've searched the forums, the wiki and anything else I could think of. I've tried copying palettes from working ANIs and all kinds of other trickery and I can NOT get these things to work. They either don't show up, or the quadrants to respond to getting hit.

Please.... Help....

I'm going to sleep now......

[attachment deleted by ninja]

[Talon 1024]

You had the right palette, but for some reason, it got reversed.  I don't know what's causing the palette to get reversed, but what software are you using to export the paletted bitmaps?

[Shivan Hunter]

shouldn't they work as 24bbp images now, or is that just the rest of the HUD?

shield ANIs (and briefing ANIs... and weapon ANIs... etc) have always been wonky, I remember making a few myself and it was insane

[Droid803]

"generate icon"

screw ANIs.

[mjn.mixael]

generate icon? Wut?

I tried... moar info plz.

[Dragon]

Comment out "$Shield Icon:" line and add "Generate icon" flag.
Voila! No need to mess with anis.

[Shivan Hunter]

meh... the shields on the "generate icon" thingy don't look all that great

[Droid803]

"generate icon" as a flag in ships.tbl makes the game render the model from a top-down view as a shield icon.
You get full-color too!

But the shield bars aren't that great, yeah, they form a box.

[mjn.mixael]

Meh.. I'd rather get these working. Also, I used Photoshop.

I guess it's worth asking.. anyone willing to try and fix them for me? I've had about as much frustration with these as I can take for now...

[Galemp]

Use MS Paint. I'm serious. Open an existing ANI in Paint, paste in your frame, and save as BMP. It will preserve the palette of the existing image.

[Droid803]

Photoshop does it too.

[mjn.mixael]

Photoshop does it too.

Apparently not correctly.

Use MS Paint. I'm serious. Open an existing ANI in Paint, paste in your frame, and save as BMP. It will preserve the palette of the existing image.

then do you use Bright to make the .pcx files?

[Droid803]

I does it correctly when I do it.
Otherwise HeadANIs wouldn't work either.

[bigchunk1]

Here's how I make them, and I got them to work:

Step 1: Go into your Freespace directory and look in the sparky.vp in the hud folder. Look for a retail .ani with a shield border that will fit your ship. Open one of the retail made shield .anis and extract it into a clean folder. Open the .ani using Aniview and export the .ani as separate frames. 

Step 2: Open fred and get rid of gridlines, stars and labels. Take a screenshot from the top of the fighter you want to make a shield .ani for.

Step3: Open the first frame in your extracted retail .ani using a program that can import .pcx (I like gimp for this) and paste your freded image on top of it. Your pasted image should turn grey because your paint program converted the screenshot to greyscale for you. Make sure you line it up well so it will fit inside the shield. You might need to scale it.

Edit: also might want to darken the background to ensure it's pure black. This will make the background transparent.

Step 4: Go into .ani builder and build the images as a 'command briefing or animation' type. You should now see your new fighter as part of the shield ani. Give it a new name to be used as a table reference.

Step 5: Double check table references in the ships.tbl, make sure you got the newly made .ani in <mod>/data/hud and it should be good to go. 

That's all I do and it works. Not exactly sure why these won't work. You might be using the wrong .ani type or you might have the incorrect .pcx format. Should be greyscale with the appropriate dimensions.

[mjn.mixael]

Ok, I did exactly that. The one for the Shrike works, but the others still don't seem to change intensity when fired upon in-game. Could it be something in the tables?

EDIT: I'm 90% sure it's a table issue. I swapped the icon the Shrike uses to the one I made for the Mustang Alpha. The icon worked properly in-game. What the crap kind of table settings can cause the icon's shield quadrants to seem like they aren't registering hits?

EDIT2: I've attached the table I'm using.. the ships in question are at the top, Shrike, Mustang Alpha, Mustang Beta, Kestrel.

EDIT3: Nope, I'm a frakking tard... POFs need shield meshes to register shield hits. It just dawned on me. So now.. what's the most successful way of creating shield meshes?

[attachment deleted by ninja]

[bigchunk1]

Load (using load button while shield is selected in pcs2) them from other models and scale/move them into place using pcs2.

[mjn.mixael]

Load (using load button while shield is selected in pcs2) them from other models and scale/move them into place using pcs2.

Brilliance, thank you.

[Galemp]

then do you use Bright to make the .pcx files?

Bright might try to repallettize them. Just convert with IrfanView.

[JGZinv]

Just as an answer to the OP... Photoshop handles palettes strangely, me and Backslash ran into this
exact issue years ago and had to make a custom palette that would work with Photoshop specifically.
PSP seems to work fine for whatever reason.

I've attached it for ya.

[attachment deleted by ninja]

[mjn.mixael]

oh hey, that's pretty sweet, thanks!