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karamazovnew · 09-08-09, 07:53 PM

Stop and think for a second. You have dragable items (the crew), that dynamically change depending on their rank and your actions (draging them from station to station). Now look around the menu_1024_768.ini file and search for any type of condition. Found any? Nope... Take a well known item such as the Fire and Lock buttons. I have yet to find any instances of those items id's in any file in the game. How do they work you ask? Through hard-coding locked in dll and act files which are out of your reach. With the exception of dials (only in the periscope, attack map and bottom bar), you can't make any item in SH4 that does anything but sit there and look preety. All of the items that do something are actually controlled by the game's engine code (unmoddable). There are also hundreds of invisible and unused items there, left over from sh3 (such as the entire old orders buttons, complete with image files). I suggest you PM lurker or someone in the RFB team. They have done amazing work within the crew page and they might explain better how to reuse existing crew compartments through the menu_1024_768.ini file.

There are so few differences between the menu.ini file in SH4 and the one in SH3 that they didn't even bother to write "dds" as the extension for graphic files.For the game, either crewsystemsmanagement.dds or crewsystemsmanagement.tga are the same thing. The dds files are simple tga files, with absolutely no smart resolution scaling. Scaling is done by the Zone line of the items but I won't go into that here. The important thing is that you don't need to bother with the weird dds features, you can use tga files with any compression, with or without alpha channels.

And now to answer your main problem. Unlike in SH3, the portraits in SH4 are generic, not specific. You can't have 2 officers of the same rank with different faces (as you did in sh3). You can photoshop the crewsystemsmanagement.dds file as much as you want, but do so in the current layout of the items inside it. You don't have ANY other choice. You can make them moustaches and weird hats, but not much else. The reason why the icons act weird on promotions is the game code. The RFB manual explains well the ranks and why some ranks are skipped (or simply put the "if" statements in the code only accept certain rank numbers when deciding which portrait to show). You also can't go beyond the maximum nuber of officers or petty officers. That's why you have that bug. And, at least through the menu_1024_768.ini file, you can't solve it in any way.

09-08-09, 07:53 PM	#5
karamazovnew The Old Man Join Date: Mar 2009 Location: Bucharest, Romania Posts: 1,403 Downloads: 151 Uploads: 0	Stop and think for a second. You have dragable items (the crew), that dynamically change depending on their rank and your actions (draging them from station to station). Now look around the menu_1024_768.ini file and search for any type of condition. Found any? Nope... Take a well known item such as the Fire and Lock buttons. I have yet to find any instances of those items id's in any file in the game. How do they work you ask? Through hard-coding locked in dll and act files which are out of your reach. With the exception of dials (only in the periscope, attack map and bottom bar), you can't make any item in SH4 that does anything but sit there and look preety. All of the items that do something are actually controlled by the game's engine code (unmoddable). There are also hundreds of invisible and unused items there, left over from sh3 (such as the entire old orders buttons, complete with image files). I suggest you PM lurker or someone in the RFB team. They have done amazing work within the crew page and they might explain better how to reuse existing crew compartments through the menu_1024_768.ini file. There are so few differences between the menu.ini file in SH4 and the one in SH3 that they didn't even bother to write "dds" as the extension for graphic files.For the game, either crewsystemsmanagement.dds or crewsystemsmanagement.tga are the same thing. The dds files are simple tga files, with absolutely no smart resolution scaling. Scaling is done by the Zone line of the items but I won't go into that here. The important thing is that you don't need to bother with the weird dds features, you can use tga files with any compression, with or without alpha channels. And now to answer your main problem. Unlike in SH3, the portraits in SH4 are generic, not specific. You can't have 2 officers of the same rank with different faces (as you did in sh3). You can photoshop the crewsystemsmanagement.dds file as much as you want, but do so in the current layout of the items inside it. You don't have ANY other choice. You can make them moustaches and weird hats, but not much else. The reason why the icons act weird on promotions is the game code. The RFB manual explains well the ranks and why some ranks are skipped (or simply put the "if" statements in the code only accept certain rank numbers when deciding which portrait to show). You also can't go beyond the maximum nuber of officers or petty officers. That's why you have that bug. And, at least through the menu_1024_768.ini file, you can't solve it in any way.