Birth of the Federation

By f*ck, I finally got it working for a few images, and it looks beautiful. It turns out that last problem was with me forgetting to totally remove the alpha channel before converting with UE. I like ImageMagick, it's very powerful, but getting the exact order of operations right is... well, the devil is in details. Now I'll let it rip for the next two hours to convert all the TGAs.

Next issue: Has anyone ever resized the planet animations (ANI's)? I believe UE can extract the frames. Is it as simple as resizing the images and they'll work? Resizing the fonts might be a little tricky, if we should even bother.

TC resized a few of the updated ones from my Animation Pack, and the scale ups look rather nice. Only ones I would scale up however are the gas giant and sun animations, the habitable planets should be left alone (for dramatic effect)

regarding fonts they're in a special .fnt which is a 16bit tga format with a headder infomation of width breakdown so should be easy enough to make a coversion program (hint: hint-- maybe a program that can convert any font file??)

I agree with tethys about making the main planet .ani's seem smaller. I've always felt that the habitable planets looked far to big; however UE can extract the frames so maybe thats the place to start??

Keep up the hard work QD I have next week of work and I'm hoping to get TOS MOS near completion but you just keep giving me so many delicious treats.

Yeah, you're right about the fonts. I built a partial clone of the BotF GUI system before while I was reverse engineering the WDF files. I forgot I actually wrote a program that can work with the fonts. It's called "FontTool". It'll be easy enough to modify it to resize the fonts.

With all the scripts and tools I'm writing, the good news is that it shouldn't be difficult at all to switch the TOS mod (or any mod) to 1024x768 if you feel like it.

fonts simple fix would be to rename font files

cardsn9.fnt (discard)
cardsn15.fnt rename to cardsn9.fnt
cardsn20.fnt rename to cardsn15.fnt
cardsn28.fnt rename to cardsn20.fnt
leave a copy of cardsn28.fnt unedited

do this for all races font

as for the ANI files I say leave them this will allow more room without editing

thunderchero

Thanks thunder, I tried it and it'll do nicely for the moment. I'll post some screenshots after the TGA's finish resizing and I convert them using UE. At the rate it's going, that'll probably be tomorrow

Niiiice QD, keep up the excelent work.
So i guess my work would be, when all this it´s done, and work fine, I´ll start to redo all buttons at the right scale ?

@ QD i may overhaul the gui to 1024x768 but only after release

EDIT:

TC mentioned the fonts dont forget generic (9??) IIRC may need an upsize for the map but if you on a large map may not want a bigger font?

@QD is the GUI map any problems?

I've haven't managed to resize the fonts properly yet, but TC's technique of just renaming them is okay. And the map is fine, I patched the galaxy sector size constants in Trek.exe. Overall I'm still having a little trouble with the graphics -- after all that converting last night, the game just crashes out with the new TGAs.

Edit: I think small font is better for starsystem names on the map.

@QD have you converted the .wdf files i.e. upscaled all the possition and dimention values?

Sorry to hear you are having problems, I am sure you will get it working the way you want soon

thunderchero

Peter1981 wrote:@QD have you converted the .wdf files i.e. upscaled all the position and dimension values?

Yeah, I have them on my computer. I'm away for the weekend so I'm not doing any work on this til tomorrow/Monday.

I'm officially abandoning my attempts at resizing the graphics. It's turned out to be a colossal waste of time.
1) I still have no idea what causes the problem of buttons turning black when you hover over them.
2) The graphics look ugly when resized, and takes a complicated procedure to resize acceptably.
3) What's the point of using 1024x768 if it's going to replicate 800x600?

Anyway I've gone back to my original plan of enlarging the screens without resizing the graphics. I've only started, but I'm making good progress.

@QD re:1)

maybe trek.exe contains mirrored info that must also be update like the energy screen?

I would rather have it how QD proposes, same size graphics but make the wdf's bigger, but the background tga's will still need to be enlarged, or redone completely using vanilla 'cutouts' of the GUI