how to contribute graphics?

[[G#057]]

Hi,

I happily stumbled upon this project when I was browsing the pygame
website, remembering what a great game moonbase commander was.
Now I want to make some graphics for this project (if you want them)
but I am unsure how they work.
I've seen that tether.png & hub.png have #FF00FF spots that are ment
to change to the team color, but when if I want to create light effect
on i.e. the tower model? Is that possible? (brighter & darker spots on
the team color)
And when I have something graphics to give you, where do I need to
post them? I assume in the corresponding "Issues" post?

[donkyhotay]

We'd be more then happy to get some help with the graphics, as you've
probably noticed that is the section we're having the most problems with
as we've only ever had one real artist and he isn't very active anymore.
Thats why there are so many placeholder graphics just to get us by. I
don't know the HTML notation for the colors since the coding goes by RGB
format but currently there are two colors that are used to represent the
team colors:

red=244
green=0
blue=254
and
red=255
green=0
blue=255

MoonPy is currently designed that when it finds either of these two
colors it replaces them automatically with one of the team colors
depending on how many teams there are (maximum of 4 as of right now).
This way we only need one copy of all graphics for the entire game
rather then multiple copies for each team, and adding more teams then 4
becomes a simple matter of specifying a new color in the code. There is
*currently* no possibility of having light/dark spots within the team
colors but thats mostly because there has never been a need for it since
there are no light/dark spots within the team color sections right now.
I have been considering changing it so that rather then have a unique
color for each team, simply have it that "your" units are one color,
your team mates units are a different color, and enemy units are a 3rd
color (probably green, blue, red). This way we can (theoretically) have
unlimited numbers of teams playing without having to worry about colors
being so similar they are hard to tell apart. This would also more
easily open the way to having a wider range of team colors on the units
themselves allowing for light/dark spots within the colors themselves.
I'd just need to know the range so I can put limits on it. Sending me an
example or two would let me know what the range should be. The easiest
way to send me the files (at least in the short term) would probably be
posting them in the relevant issue. If you want to become an official
contributer with SVN write access (which would be easier in the long
term) let me know and I do that for you.

Do not be afraid to joust a giant just because some people believe in
windmills.

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[[G#057]]

Hi,

Using 3 colors for yourself / teammate / enemy sounds like a good
idea. (One could render 3 images whit the needed colors)
Something else you may try is to change the Hue of the image?
Wikipedia has a small article about the math. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hue
You could dive 360° by the amount of players and that would be the
amount for 1 player that the color needs to move.

[donkyhotay]

Pre-rendering the images with all 3 colors works though it's a little
inefficient. Doing it that way would require having 3 copies of every
building *and* weapon. Even if the weapons were completely identical
without individual coloring (though I'd prefer having them colored) we
would need copies for each one just because of the way the code works.
Buildings and weapons are both considered 'units' within the game engine
and are treated identically. This means the building and weapon graphics
are loaded and displayed the same. We can't have 3 copies of only
buildings and 1 copy of weapons without breaking everything and
rewriting a good chunk of the graphical part of the engine (which I
don't want to do). I'd prefer to have one copy of everything but have it
designed in such a way that it's easy for the game to manipulate the
image to conform to it's needs (basically what we have now). This way if
the code changes or people want to have options for showing individual
colors for each player it can easily be done without having to recreate
all the images. Also it'll save on space, while the images are a
relatively small part of the game right now and tripling them would only
increase the size of MoonPy by about 200kb that could easily multiply if
we start getting lots of different mods/races/etc. Changing the coloring
within the code is pretty easy for me. All I need to know is what the
range of color representing the team colors is going to be and I can
change it. Theoretically I could do the entire range of purple (green =
0) from completely dark to white and then modify it into similar shades
of other colors. I only have two shades of purple set right now because
that is all the graphics currently use. If the graphics use more then I
can expand the code to accept more colors. Just make certain that
whatever shades you use for team colors is not used anywhere else in the
graphic because otherwise it will change there too.

[[G#057]]

Hi,

I uploaded my bridge, repair & tether images both one whit shades and
one whitout.
I tried to make them look like the images from the moonbase commander
game.
However I did not simplify the images whit shades, I'll try to redo
them tomorrow whit 3 shades or something if you want.
The models are made in blender and rendered in luxrender (both open-
source) if you want I can upload the .blend files too.

PS: I have also redone the bomb but there wasn't a issues for it :p

Happy New year !

> > Wikipedia has a small article about the math.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hue

[Jon Handy]

Looks good! Thanks bunches, looking forward to see more. :)

[donkyhotay]

Thanks alot! They look really good. I've uploaded the images onto SVN
for backup purposes. I haven't implemented them into the game itself yet
because I am going to update the code to handle the new shaded graphics
as well as modify change team colors to a perspective based (3 colors
only) system. I added a number of new issues onto the issue tracking
regarding this, I also added one specifically for the bombs so you can
upload that image as well. The link for that issue is:
http://code.google.com/p/tether/issues/detail?id=184&colspec=ID%20Priority%20Status%20Owner%20Summary

[donkyhotay]

BTW, if you want credit for your submission in the authors/credits file
let me know what name you want to be listed as. Otherwise I'll put you
down as stijndw1337 since I don't know what else to call you.

Do not be afraid to joust a giant just because some people believe in
windmills.

[[G#057]]

Hi,

I uploaded all 'high Priority' graphic's as well as the bomb.
You can place my real name in the authors/credits file. "Stijn De
Wachter".

On Jan 1, 3:09 am, donkyhotay <donkyho...@verizon.net> wrote:
> BTW, if you want credit for your submission in the authors/credits file
> let me know what name you want to be listed as. Otherwise I'll put you
> down as stijndw1337 since I don't know what else to call you.
>
> Do not be afraid to joust a giant just because some people believe in
> windmills.
>
> donkyhotay wrote:
> > Thanks alot! They look really good. I've uploaded the images onto SVN
> > for backup purposes. I haven't implemented them into the game itself yet
> > because I am going to update the code to handle the new shaded graphics
> > as well as modify change team colors to a perspective based (3 colors
> > only) system. I added a number of new issues onto the issue tracking
> > regarding this, I also added one specifically for the bombs so you can
> > upload that image as well. The link for that issue is:

> >http://code.google.com/p/tether/issues/detail?id=184&colspec=ID%20Pri...

[donkyhotay]

Great, I've already adjusted the team colors so it only shows self,
allies, enemies and uploaded that onto SVN. I'll be working on
displaying shaded team colors today now that I have enough examples to
know get an idea of what the range of team colors are. This shouldn't
take too long and I'll probably finish that sometime today.

[donkyhotay]

I've implemented the new graphics with shading. For future reference,
the range of 'purple' designated to take the place of team colors must
meet either of the following two rules:

red and blue must be within 10 of each other and green less then 50 of both

or

red and blue must be within 30 of each other and green less then 100 of both

This works with all of the samples you have given me so far, so as long
as you keep doing what you have been the new graphics should fit without
any problems. I have also given you write SVN access if you want to
upload your work directly however if you'd rather continue uploading
into the issues thats fine as well. Once we've replaced all the
placeholder graphics with real graphics I'll go ahead and create a new
package. While testing the graphics I have found a few new bugs and also
confirmed the very annoying 'vanishing building' bug that I thought I
had fixed is still around. I didn't make my goal of reaching 0.8.00 by
the end of 2009 but hopefully it won't take too long to reach that point.