Fo Buttons Setup

posted on November 14th, 2003, 2:20 am

Hello once again.
I have the wireframes setup figured out but I'm having math trouble with the buttons setup in FO.
I know they are on a texture 512 x 512 with alpha, each button 80 x 80 pixels.
What i'm having trouble with is the gui_global.spr entries.

"I need to know the correct format of the entries."

The button texture is made up of 6 rows by 6 rows of buttons.The gui_global is not in order so it's not easy to figure it out.The model entries are seperate from the weapons entries making it quite difficult.

Would someone be so kind as to give a complete example as to the "entries" for an entire 36 button.tga?

BTW, I wish to use this to improve other mods buttons cutting down on file loading and keeping the files more organised.

Thank you in advance!

posted on November 16th, 2003, 12:42 pm

I finally had the time this morning to figure out the gui_global entries for the new buttons.I had to write them out on paper and fill-in the gaps.

Question to developers:

1. Does all the models in Fleet Ops rely or linked to the new damage textures in the sprites by the hierachy of the model?If this is so, would a new model that comes with its own damage textures disrupt the game engine?
I replaced the Fleet Ops Galaxy class with Deemons and the Borg Cube.Deemons Galaxy has its own damage textures that I suspect are causing a problem.I went on a one on one with the Feds and Borg and when these 2 ships confronted each other the game slowed to a complete crawl but didnt crash.I think Fleet Ops was trying to link to the damage textures that it neede and couldnt because the new Galaxy isnt linked to your damage system.I am running XP and thats probable why it didnt crash outright.
I can fix this if this is an issue with all new models added.

BTW this is only information for myself and not a mod.I am well known in the community though I am new to the Fleet Ops forum.

posted on November 16th, 2003, 2:18 pm

You´re right, the model is looking for damage textures or sprites. I´ve experienced similar slowdowns with some ships, when they became damaged.
There are two solutions:
- Put the missing "damage_xyz".tga to your FO texture/RGB directory
- If this doesn´t help, you´ll have to integrate the missing damage sprites to the fleetops.spr. This is difficult stuff, because FO is using a different sprite architecture.

Another thing that you´ll have to know is, that some models are crashing the Admirals Log, when aborting, loosing or winning a instant action mission.

I tested a lot of ships you can dl on A2files or AFC.
Most of them crash, the only fully compatible with FO sods I found, are miranda by Chakotay, Prometheus (by Gonwee, MVAM has to be edited a lot to work), german USS Defiant-Mod by Barthi and the danube class runabout without torpedo launcher.

posted on November 16th, 2003, 3:21 pm

yep, Fleet Operations uses a new sod, odf and sprite architecture, as well as some changes to the global a2 engine so many ships out there won't work for Fleet Operations or have to be edited. Perhaps i will write a few tutorials in the far future how to create or edit sods which are 100% compatible with the Fleet Operations system..
btw, if you use a downloaded sod, odf or sprite for Fleet Operations, which is not part of a official Fleet Operations release there can be crashes everywhere, so we can not give support for this if we won't to finish flops before 2010 ;-)
Fleet Operations is not ment as a model or sprite pool

posted on November 16th, 2003, 4:40 pm

Optec, LtCdr thank you for your reply's!

I've always understood that I mod at my own risk. " Mad Laughter"
Tech support for this is limited I realise that.

I do have experiance at editing A2 and I'm spending this morning going over the FO sprite files.
I have enough ,aterials for many new races but that thought of editng those to Fleet Ops is daunting to say the least. mg:

Based on your info and from what I have seen I will basically have to edit each individual "new" sod to the FO damage hierarchy ( alot of time requiered )
or
manually add the damage sprite entries and textures to FO and hope they dont crash the FO sprite engine.

The damage textures are in the rgb folder but I didnt edit the sprite files as of yet.

posted on November 16th, 2003, 5:04 pm

BTW, I do use the utmv tool by assimsoft to view the hierachy of each sod model so I know what sod uses what.

If I was to manually add the old A2 sprite entries to Fleet Ops do you see any problems that this might cause to Fleet Ops running the way it should.

I know there is no gaurantee's.

posted on November 16th, 2003, 5:12 pm

hm, think this should work, yep

posted on November 16th, 2003, 8:54 pm

Yeah I realised that it would be far easier to just add the old damage sprites to Fleet Ops and all the old stuff will work.In fact I just did that.
So now all the old sods that referenced crew1-16 now hopefully will work.
I did see that you guys have kept all the old data in the srpite files such as emiters and animations.That saves me alot of work.Thank you!

Theres one mystery I'm still trying to solve with Fleet Ops damage system.

How does Fleet Ops reference the Borg textures when a ship becomes assimilated?
I see no refernece in the Fleet Ops sprites that belong to any borg textures.
The old Armada 2 refers to Xborgify.tga and a few custom ships come with there own damage textures that I could eliminate if needed.

I have opened up several Fleet Ops sods and they have inside the hierarchy this:
root
damage
Borg
Line03
Line02
Line01

This tells me that each Fleet Ops sod is tied to Borg textures possibly named Line03 etc... or a sprite line but I dont see this so far.
Any help is appreciated and thank you for the info you have provided.

[LtCdr]

posted on November 17th, 2003, 11:14 am

Last edited by LtCdr on November 17th, 2003, 11:47 am, edited 1 time in total.

BTW, what and where is the sprite for Warp effect ?
I´m not able to locate it.

Edit: Found it, but another question. I want to change the default colour for the races in the race selection menu, where are the colours defined ?
Default for FleetOps is red as first colour, but I want blue.