[TEC] Recognition Manual Entries and the Sonar

[CapnScurvy]

I can not for the life of me figure out what creates the specific ship entries in the RM. For instance, there are Roster/Canadian/Ship "ship.cfg" files that are not displayed within the RM such as the TugBoat.cfg. The ship does not appear in the Canadian part of the game manual?!. Where do you find the "trigger" to have a specific ship entry shown in the manual? Perhaps there is more than one place to have the ship listed so it appears?

And while I'm asking, where do you find the make up of the Sonar/Radar screen page? I've looked within the Menu_1024_768.ini 'till my eyes hurt.

Any help would be appreciated.

[DrBeast]

Originally Posted by CapnScurvy

And while I'm asking, where do you find the make up of the Sonar/Radar screen page? I've looked within the Menu_1024_768.ini 'till my eyes hurt.

There isn't any :hmm:

[CapnScurvy]

Originally Posted by DrBeast

There isn't any :hmm:

Sooo......., the sonar screen just spawns from the internal game data? What I'm looking to do is widen the Bearing Input dial so the edges arn't cut off with the use of the TM Guages (I think they were made by Oakgrove). The problem I see is the guage is larger by a couple of pixels than stock and its a bit off center (to the left). I can resize and move the image but the clarity is lost with the resave. So I wanted to see if I could make the page mask larger to fit the gauge image. Or maybe have the zone parameters resize and move the image for me.

This brings up another noob question, do you know how to rework an image without losing clarity each time you save it? I either use Photo Shop or DXTBmp. Usually the alpha gets sent to PhotoShop since the DXTBmp only saves the image in 16 bits. My PhotoShop has the Nvida plugin for correct image saves to 24 bit but, using either one the clarity of the reworked image is usually not worth the effort.

[swdw]

Are you saving them as a .dds file, or another format while working on them?

tga is a better "working" format and then do the final export to dds The other thing that affecst this is the number of mipmap levels created during the save. The fewer mipmap levels, the less clear it looks. I think this is selectable with the nvidia plugin.

The other problem you may be having is the game resizing the texture for your screen resolution.

You can try a higher res texture, but you might have to remap it to get the references correct.

[DrBeast]

Originally Posted by CapnScurvy

Sooo......., the sonar screen just spawns from the internal game data? What I'm looking to do is widen the Bearing Input dial so the edges arn't cut off with the use of the TM Guages (I think they were made by Oakgrove). The problem I see is the guage is larger by a couple of pixels than stock and its a bit off center (to the left).

I think that's easier done if you modify the cameras.dat. Just move the sonar camera back a bit, and you should be ok.

[CapnScurvy]

Originally Posted by swdw

Are you saving them as a .dds file, or another format while working on them?

tga is a better "working" format and then do the final export to dds The other thing that affecst this is the number of mipmap levels created during the save. The fewer mipmap levels, the less clear it looks. I think this is selectable with the nvidia

plugin.

The Rec Manual images for the particular ships are given in .tga and in .dds. The pictures actually used in the Manual are the sil.dds ones. So perhaps the .tga image could be reworked, then saved to a .dds and the clarity will be better? I'll see if I can change the mipmap levels to increase the clairity as well.

The sonar bearing image only comes in a .dds format, so are you saying I could save this image as a .tga, do my business, then resave back to a .dds without too much loss of quality? As I have found for instance, the particular image could be moved and resized to fit the game established parameters better, but when you save the work the ledgebility of the text sucks after the resave. The trade off is hardly worth the effort unless the image clarity could be saved as well.