Originally Posted by Stevepine (Post 1374393)

question: is green the right colour for the scope markings? just curious

Originally Posted by karamazovnew (Post 1374422)

Take the fat needles for example, with the rounded plastic bulb that hides the metal screw. It has 2 highlights, diametrically opposed. What I did was copy a small section of that bulb and mask it. It's already done, it's inside the same tga file that has the needles. You'll have to figure out what the exact pixel position is by backtracking the crop line (easy to do with the menu editor). My dials were all done something like this:

1. All dial Background embedded in one single image due to cropping issues. This is clickable and does nothing (click mask)
2. Dial group:
2.1. Dial Background (transparent but clickable)
2.2. Needle Shadows (2 separate needles, you also have them there, just check the alpha channel).
2.3. Needle
2.4. Needle Highlight (static bmp)
3. Glass
4. Metal Panel.

So yeah.. it was a bit complex... but when I tried to stack them up in the normal way i got clipping margins that looked ugly. By default, when scaling images for different resolutions, the game will display about 1 or 0.5 pixels around the mask of the images. This means that all items will be surrounded by an ugly dark line if they were placed on a dark background in the dds file. Double so when overlapping images (as you do when you create dials). So I always made sure to retain a bit of slack around my objects, you'll see that all of my items in the tga files have a bit of metal background around them and a generous mask. Now you know why :D

Originally Posted by reaper7 (Post 1374428)

"All dial Background embedded in one single image" What is meant by this?
Sorry if I'm being a bit slow :88).

Originally Posted by karamazovnew (Post 1374452)

I was reffering to the TDC_Panel_Inner.tga and Torp_panel_Inner.tga. Those are the only places where you'll be able to see the dial plates. You'll see that they're already obstructed by the metal panel.

I think it's a bad practice to use separate files for each item. The game takes longer to load. Cropping is easy once you get the hang of it. Doing it in Notepad and starting the game each time to see the results was NOT fun. But I got used to it after a while. That Menu Editor is a gem :D.
There's also one more thing you need to worry about when placing items sepparately. Just before releasing my mod I decided to decrease the brightness for all items. By only having to change 2-3 files it took me a couple of minutes. Imagine trying to edit 90+ files :har:.

Originally Posted by Cap.Palla (Post 1374813)

Wow great work here!! :yeah:
Can you post a pecentage of the work you've done?? Are you at 50% or...70%....or 99%? :O: I can't really wait to use this great mod!!

Originally Posted by ologuy (Post 1378371)

Dude, that looks just great!
Are all the Dials for targetbearing etc. working properly?

Maybe you could work together with TheDarkWraith to get all the scripting and stuff working.

Originally Posted by ologuy (Post 1378444)

Is it possible to play with this UI on a resolution of 1680x1050?

Originally Posted by reaper7 (Post 1378489)

It should work at that resolution, don't have a monitor that supports that high to try though :wah:.
Have it on my 1080P TV for testing as monitor is only 1440x900 Max.
The Graphics are fixed size so do not scale so it just means that in the TDC screen the panels will be closer to the center scope, but I am working on having the Panels appear/dissapear at the touch of a button.

I am currently working on a side project that will be part of the UI as well if we can get it working.
Also have to get the camera lining up with my RAOBF graticules before I can release. Its at the slow process at the moment but it will get there.

Originally Posted by karamazovnew (Post 1374427)

The real Marks were always black. Only the center lines were lit because they were painted with glow-in-the-dark paint. But since we don't have red bulbs in our houses, we're using all-green marks at night.

The original marks in the game are made to change colour by hardcode at night. By placing any image inside the same group as the marks, you can fool the game and create custom auto-lighting marks. But the AOBF "special" marks must be placed in the AOBF group so... you either have always-green or always-black marks there. :cry: Maybe something can be done through scripting.