BS SHP Builder 3.0: Beta Testing next week!
BS SHP Builder 3.0 will revolutionize your way to create infantry, buildings, cameos and animations! This version is much faster than the old one and uses less RAM memory (except in few situations). It has much more features and tools that will be of a great aid to make your modding better and faster, even if your experience on producing SHP files is limited.
BS SHP Builder 3.0
Features:
=> Infantry Generator:
BS SHP Builder 3.0 features a primitive infantry generator where you can generate an infantry based in the conscript. You can edit the head, body, arms, legs and weapon and the program will try to attach and rotate the pieces to generate the guard, walking, attacking and prone frames. (Dying frames are too hard
) Future versions will include an infantry generator with more details, but this will make infantry production much easier!
=> Cameo Generator:
BS SHP Builder 3.0 includes a cameo generator that creates cameos for RA2 and TS with gloss effect and based on Blade, Kravvitz or few other ways. You might be able to open any frame from your SHP file and transform it to cameo in a new file or.. get a single frame and transform it to cameo in your own file. This cameo generator also produces texts with RA2 fonts. It currently need a small touch to accept custom backgrounds, so you might also be able to put these cool fmv background to make your cameo looking cool.
=> Sequence Maker:
BS SHP Builder 3.0 includes a sequence creator, which is a tool that will aid you to code the sequence of your infantry files at art(md).ini. This tools seems to be currently restricted to RA2/YR at the moment and also, you may have problems if you use Win9x and the infantry has more than 200mb (except if you have a good RAM, but 384mb isnt enough
), due to the bad memory management of the system. But still, this tool is of a great help, since coding sequences is a pain in the ass!
=> Find And Replace Sections:
BS SHP Builder includes a great feature that is one of the best tools when editing infantry: Find And Replace. It works similar to a text editor... you select a part of the picture in any frame, and then, put the way you wanna replace it. Finally, you choose if you want it to find also copies of the selected section that were rotated and you can replaced with a rotated (or not) as well. This saves a lot of time when you wanna modify weapons, or a part of the body of the infantry and you dont wanna modify all 300 or more frames of it.
=> Canvas Resizing:
Now you can resize the canvas of specific frames or all frames of your SHP with BS SHP Builder 3.0. Canvas Resizing is also included when you are importing image(s) as SHP, specially when the size of the frames are different. Unlike XCC Mixer, BS SHP Builder allows import of images with different sizes and it can sort the situation with a manual canvas or an automatic resize.
=> Instant Recolouring: Pal Pack Included!:
Pal Pack was originally created by ArgCmdr and CannisRabiddus to make infantry recolouring much easier. With a good use of Image Robot, you could recolour 600 frames in few seconds, but you still have a lot of work. BS SHP Builder 3.0 includes Pal Pack I (ArgCmdr's palettes only) and Pal Pack II and some extra recolouring schemes. And more, it allows you to create your own custom scheme, so you can recolour in the way you want and it takes LESS THAN ONE SECOND! You can turn an allied infantry to soviet in one click of the mouse, or what about turning it to GDI? Pal Pack does a high quality recolouring instantaneously and it allows you to recolour only a selected region or only the current frame. If you dislike it, you can undo it. Undo? hmm....
=> UNDO: If you commit a mistake, you can always fix it!
BS SHP Builder 3.0 finally includes an option to undo everything you did wrong. If you painted the wrong pixel, or resized to the wrong size... wiped the wrong frame? Undo fixes everything, including auto shadows...Auto shadows? Hmmm...
=> AutoShadows:
BS SHP Builder 3.0 includes an improved version of the auto shadows of 2.1. This time it chooses the correct shadow colour. RA2 infantry doesnt need autoshadows. TS ones works well with an angle of 130. Autoshadows are also extremely faster and takes less than 3 seconds in big infantry files.
=> Improved Colour Replacement:
BS SHP Builder 3.0 has a greatly improved Colour Replacement tool. BS SHP Builder 2.1 allowed to selected up to 5 colours, and if you wanted the recolour in the current frame or in all frames and the conversion was very slow, could take minutes! The version 3.0 allows you to modify up to 18 colours per time, allow you to select the from which frame to which frame you want the conversion to happen and also it allows you to convert only the selected area if you want. Conversion takes less than 2 seconds even with 18 colours. But that's not all. BS SHP Builder 3.0 will also allow you to create 24bit effects in your SHP. It allows you to add or remove red, green and blue. Then, it generates a temporary picture with the new colours and reconvert it back to 8bit with the colour conversion methods. Colour Replacement Tool also has a third option that allows you to convert colours from one palette to another, also with the help from the colour conversion methods.
=> New Colour Conversion Methods:
Colour conversion methods are algorithms that converts 24bit colours to 8 bit colour used in C&C (exceptions: Renegade and Generals) images. It's used many times... when importing external image files to shp, when getting a copied data from Paint to BS SHP Builder, on some of the colour replacement options mentioned above, etc... It includes the following new CCMs:
-> (R+G+B) Advanced Difference: This is the best algorithm generated by Stu and its conversions are quite reliable. It initially gets the closer colours by the sum of the differences of red, green and blue (R+G+B) and then, it tries to get the best through the 3d distance of the original colour and the finalists (3D RGB).
-> (3D RGB) Full Difference Colour Plus!: This algorithm is an improved version of the Full Difference (which used to be the best CCM in BS SHP Builder 2.1) by using priority factors to choose the best colour. It generates amazing results in light pictures and good in darker ones.
-> (3D RGB) Infurium: This algorithm produces the most reliable results, most of the times. It does a hard check through 3D distance of colours, 3D distances of the avarage neighborhood colour, and if it still ties, it chooses by light or darkness, depending on the colour. The final quality is definitelly superior than PSP, Photoshop, XCC or similar programs.
The CCMs have been recoded since last version and even the old ones generates more reliable results than it used to. Also, due to our Colour Banks caching technology, the conversion happens much faster than it used to. And finally, if you dont know which you should use, Stucuk has created an Auto Select that chooses the best* one (and I recoded that and it works much better now).
Note 1: This caching technology is not available in Infurium, because it needs to check the neighborhood colours and can show different results even if the colours are the same.
Note 2: Infurium is not available in colour replacement operations.
*best one based on 3d distance (3D RGB) calculations.
New Shape: Elipse:
BS SHP Builder 3.0 has finally gained an elipse tool! You can create filled and unfilled elipses. If your instincts are good, you can make a circle
with it. Unlike the screenshots previously showed, elipse tool is currently working perfectly.
New Tool: Damager:
BS SHP Builder 3.0 comes with a revolutionary tool that works only with unitXXX.pal called Damager. It generates "damaged" effects around the area that it's brushed. This can be used efficiently to create damaged frames of your building.
Batch Tool::
BS SHP Builder 3.0 includes a batch tool to convert the external pictures and SHP files that you wish to jpg, jpeg or bmp formats, so you can import them with BS SHP Builder later in the order you wish.
Multi Documents Editing:
BS SHP Builder 3.0 now allows you to edit multiple SHP files at the same time and window. You dont need to open 2 (or more) BS SHP Builders anymore to edit them. It can also auto-organize them for you. It's also good to use them to copy data from one to another file or do comparisons. BS SHP Builder 3.0 also allows you open 2 (or more) windows of the same document, so you can compare different frames of it.
32x Zoom:
Zoom now ranges from 1x to 32x (instead of just 8x), however, the higher the zoom, the higher the ammount of resources it uses. This might not be a problem in WinXP, but Win9x users may receive error messages if memory isnt enough to deal with it.
Etc...:
Etc is not a feature
, but since our imagination is unlimited, we have implemented few other hidden things and a tremendous ammount of bug fixes in the program, making the program much more stable and faster than older versions.
As you may see, BS SHP Builder 3.0 will really kick ass and change your concepts of editing or creating SHP files and it will make TS and RA2 modding become much easier. That's all I have to say for now and on next week, I might be creating a topic at CnC Editing Tools forum to apply for beta. Beta Testing will take about 1 week and we will finally release it to public. Don't miss it!
