Posted: Thu Jun 18, 2015 12:26 pm Post subject:
Questions on OpenRA limits
I have a few question on OpenRA's functionality & limits.
How customisable is the sidebar, is it possible make it look and work exactly the same as the sidebar in TS/RA2? Such as occupying the whole of the right side, without the map being rendered underneath. Also being able to scroll threw a long list of icons.
Are there any size limits on vxl or shp files? What if I wanted to make a screen sized battleship in either format etc. (I've made vxls that were 500 pixels big BTW)
Are there any limits on pal files or can custom ones be used on everything?
Are there any alternatives to TMP files for terrain hight maps, So tiles larger then TS/RA2 can be used?
IIRC you can use PNG files for terrain but can you use them for units?
Thanks for any clarification on these questions. _________________
Joined: 22 Nov 2010 Location: Iszkaszentgyorgy, Hungary
Posted: Thu Jun 18, 2015 12:57 pm Post subject:
Re: Questions on OpenRA limits
Mig Eater wrote:
How customisable is the sidebar, is it possible make it look and work exactly the same as the sidebar in TS/RA2? Such as occupying the whole of the right side, without the map being rendered underneath. Also being able to scroll threw a long list of icons.
Scrolling with wheel doesn't work from my tests. Otherwise I'd say yes - you can specify a minimum amount of empty rows, but it adds more rows when it runs out of free space. (The RA1 sidebar for example only enables scroll buttons if the amount of cameos would run out of the screen.) You can even move out the radar screen to say, the bottom left corner and fill the entire right edge with cameos.
Superweapons also are outside the sidebar (think Generals/C&C3) but all of these UI portions are completely customizable where to be placed and how.
Ah, and the game lets you move out the camera from the map (half a screen away, so map edge/corner would be at the center of the screen), which means you can't even get the UI hiding units.
Mig Eater wrote:
Are there any size limits on vxl or shp files? What if I wanted to make a screen sized battleship in either format etc. (I've made vxls that were 500 pixels big BTW)
I'd say yes, but I untested this. There's only two things - if you downsized via recalculated voxel bounds, you have to redo that via HVA matrix/scale - bounds an only be used for offset -, and fix the Scale property in the VXL header to 0,083 (match it with RenderVoxels:' which defaults to 11.7 for this very reason).
Mig Eater wrote:
Are there any limits on pal files or can custom ones be used on everything?
Infantry death animations are currently forced to share the palette. Also tilesets sadly. Any object can be repaletted freely - yes, this includes voxels, walls, rocks, trees, smudges, whatnot. You can even specify custom remap colors when you define a palette.
I don't know the terrain aspects sadly. OpenRA has custom terrain sizes with external formatting - practically only the image is read from a TMP ingame, every other aspect is extracted into yaml during conversion - but I have no experience in what means what at terrain.
PNG definitely cannot be used for units. _________________ "If you didn't get angry and mad and frustrated, that means you don't care about the end result, and are doing something wrong." - Greg Kroah-Hartman
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Past C&C projects: Attacque Supérior (2010-2019); Valiant Shades (2019-2021)
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WeiDU mods: Random Graion Tweaks | Graion's Soundsets
Maintainance: Extra Expanded Enhanced Encounters! | BGEESpawn
Contributions: EE Fixpack | Enhanced Edition Trilogy | DSotSC (Trilogy) | UB_IWD | SotSC & a lot more... QUICK_EDIT
Joined: 22 Nov 2010 Location: Iszkaszentgyorgy, Hungary
Posted: Thu Jun 18, 2015 2:11 pm Post subject:
Tiles of the whole theatre for now. I assume it'd be pretty easy to consider this as default and allow it to override per tileset - yeah I did mixed definitions, I'm that much into terrain editing - tho. _________________ "If you didn't get angry and mad and frustrated, that means you don't care about the end result, and are doing something wrong." - Greg Kroah-Hartman
=======================
Past C&C projects: Attacque Supérior (2010-2019); Valiant Shades (2019-2021)
=======================
WeiDU mods: Random Graion Tweaks | Graion's Soundsets
Maintainance: Extra Expanded Enhanced Encounters! | BGEESpawn
Contributions: EE Fixpack | Enhanced Edition Trilogy | DSotSC (Trilogy) | UB_IWD | SotSC & a lot more... QUICK_EDIT
OpenRA is very different from the WW engines in that you can write your own logic for units and the UI that you include as a dll in your mod package. Think of it like the ares project on steroids: modders can do their own thing using the large collection of interfaces that the engine exposes instead of being limited to the few extensions that the ares authors have been able to shim in against the decompiled exe code.
All of the UI (including the main menu etc, not just the sidebar) is defined in the mod dlls, and so you have near-complete freedom to do whatever you want (as long as the engine supports it: e.g. don't expect to be able to use 3d models without first contributing support to the core engine project). You just need to be prepared to write C# code if you want to do anything more interesting than moving our existing UI pieces around. If you restrict yourself to only editing the yaml using the existing UI code your choices become much more limited (but still reasonably flexible).
Want to recreate the TD/RA2/Generals/etc UIs? Sure! You could even do the weird radial menus that they put in the console releases of C&C3/RA3. Want to make your keyboard backlight glow red when you go low power? If its drivers export an appropriate API, then go for it! (somebody actually did this a couple of years ago). Replace the default server browser with an ingame interface for cncnet? You could do that too, I guess, but ugh...
The main engine limitation, which is a deliberate design choice, is that artwork inside the game world must use palettes. We implement many of the ingame effects by palette manipulation, including the custom player colors, water/nuke/chrono effects, and the fade in/out at the start/end of the game. There are no real limits on palettes, except that they must have 256 colors. The hard limit on voxel/shp size is 2048px, but you'll hit performance issues before you reach that.
There are a few weird limitations on the default traits exposed by our core mods, but you're able to either replace these in your own mod (like reaperrr did with TDX) and/or work with us to get the appropriate changes made to our main code base (like Graion Dilach did for custom cameo palettes). QUICK_EDIT
Posted: Sun Jun 21, 2015 8:23 am Post subject:
Re: Questions on OpenRA limits
Matthias M. wrote:
just add bigger values there.
You can make the tiles bigger in OpenRA but not in the TMP editor(s), so my question was can other file formats be used to recreate TS/RA2 terrain? _________________
So yea, only the image is used at the TMP. Category is for the ingame map editor to tell where list said tile. _________________ "If you didn't get angry and mad and frustrated, that means you don't care about the end result, and are doing something wrong." - Greg Kroah-Hartman
=======================
Past C&C projects: Attacque Supérior (2010-2019); Valiant Shades (2019-2021)
=======================
WeiDU mods: Random Graion Tweaks | Graion's Soundsets
Maintainance: Extra Expanded Enhanced Encounters! | BGEESpawn
Contributions: EE Fixpack | Enhanced Edition Trilogy | DSotSC (Trilogy) | UB_IWD | SotSC & a lot more... QUICK_EDIT
SHP should work. RA1 terrain is in that and if you tell it in the mod.yaml to read TS SHP that should work too.
Not really, what about the depth data and ramps/cliffs
Mig Eater wrote:
Matthias M. wrote:
just add bigger values there.
You can make the tiles bigger in OpenRA but not in the TMP editor(s), so my question was can other file formats be used to recreate TS/RA2 terrain?
I ended up wasting 3 days to get XCC to compile and then modified the TMP editor to make higher res tiles for Rewire.
Decide on the final size what you want, PM me and i'll recompile with that set, gonna take a while tho, the XCC library takes really long time to compile, you can pretty much waste a day compiling that thing _________________ Tiberian Dawn, Red Alert, Tiberian Sun ,Red Alert 2,Renegade, Command & Conquer 3,Tiberium and Tiberium Wars and Westwood related image & video archive
https://picasaweb.google.com/113361105083292812413?noredirect=1
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Joined: 22 Nov 2010 Location: Iszkaszentgyorgy, Hungary
Posted: Sun Jun 21, 2015 11:02 am Post subject:
tomsons26lv wrote:
what about the depth data and ramps/cliffs
Set Height: and RampType. That's why I picked cliffs and ramps as example tile code. _________________ "If you didn't get angry and mad and frustrated, that means you don't care about the end result, and are doing something wrong." - Greg Kroah-Hartman
=======================
Past C&C projects: Attacque Supérior (2010-2019); Valiant Shades (2019-2021)
=======================
WeiDU mods: Random Graion Tweaks | Graion's Soundsets
Maintainance: Extra Expanded Enhanced Encounters! | BGEESpawn
Contributions: EE Fixpack | Enhanced Edition Trilogy | DSotSC (Trilogy) | UB_IWD | SotSC & a lot more... QUICK_EDIT
The terrain supports exactly the same formats as the other sprite types (you can even use tmp for unit artwork, which is how we do bridges in TD/RA).
The depth data in tmp(ts) is exposed as additional frames in the sprite, like split shadows. If you include the depth data as a run of frames at the end of the shp, then the game will use them once we add depth support. QUICK_EDIT
Graion's code lists the cells of the tmp & then lets you specify the height, ramp type & colour for each of them. Shp files aren't separated into cells tho, so how are individual cells within a shp specified?
You can set TileSize & TileShape but how do you control the tile height in pixels?
@tomsons26lv:
That's great, the size you've shown there is perfect. It's probably best to have a standardised larger size any way, Gangster & I could always share tiles later etc. _________________
Shp files aren't separated into cells tho, so how are individual cells within a shp specified?
Each cell has its own shp frame (unless the tileset defines otherwise). The frame is drawn centered in the cell, so there is no need to split your art across the base tile and ExtraData.
Mig Eater wrote:
You can set TileSize & TileShape but how do you control the tile height in pixels?
If you mean the vertical offset associated with each height step, this is fixed as 512 world units (in OpenRA lingo), which corresponds to the half-row steps used in TS (i.e. tile height / 2 in pixels). This is not configurable. QUICK_EDIT
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