Sprite Creation for Idiots

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crchinoy
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Joined: 01 Feb 2017 09:57

Sprite Creation for Idiots

Post by crchinoy »

Hello all. It's been a bit since I've played much locomotion and a very long time since I've been on these forums. I used to have an account years ago as a kid, but gave up doing much here when the whole community first started to peter out. Here in college though I'm trying to find new things to do to avoid joining the legion of people going out to get drunk every night (it's a boring college in a s*** city okay) and over winter break I found my old locomotion disk.

Now, my gameplay was never especially on point, but I remember doing quite a bit of modding of the game and accumulating tons of trains, trucks etc. I had damn near every single north american vehicle and object ever released by anyone, in fact I remember having lots of trains that aren't anywhere on the internet any more that I can find (Long John Silver's entire body of work chief among them), and so I've actually asked my father to find my old hard drive from my PC from a few years ago and I should soon be able to recover all these lost files from a mirror of that drive. I had done a fair bit of messing around with locotool and recoding many of them with more accurate info, splitting multi-state freight cars into multiple single-state cars for more variation, creating new cargotypes and industries by mashing up existing building sprites to create more realistic commodity chains, etc etc. Never shared anything I made since things rarely got finished and polished enough to do so.

But the one thing I never took the plunge to do, and I've always regretted it, is editing/creating my own graphics. A 3D model I can either find or draw up in CAD (intro engineering 100 is already paying off!), I'm sure there's still old MSTS trains out there to convert (although I never had MSTS), but I have no idea how to get a working set of sprites from that. So I came back here to try my luck and ask if there's still any old heads around who might be able to lead me on the right path. I doubt I'll ever have much to release, or much of anyone here to release it to, but there's still things I want for the game that nobody ever made, and there's not many people making anything for this game anymore.

Thanks for whatever help anyone's got to offer.

-C. R. Chinoy
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Greyfox
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Location: Victoria, Australia

Re: Sprite Creation for Idiots

Post by Greyfox »

Hello crchinoy.....and welcome back.

Check with Walter1940, I'm sure he will be able to help you. He makes locomotives, and he has some very nice tutorials on his website, check his profile here: memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=17557.

Happy shunting.
Windows 10 discussion here: http://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=72527
Looking for AMI trains, Chicago Locomotive Works, etc: You'll find your needs here: http://www.locomotiondepot.net/
Here's another: http://www.walter1940.de Lots of interesting stuff on this site, including tutorials.
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Walter1940
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Re: Sprite Creation for Idiots

Post by Walter1940 »

Hi crchinoy

Let me know if I can help you somehow. Here is a tutorial on how to convert locomotives from MSTS to Locomotion. https://www.walter1940.de/tutorial/msts2loco/english/
http://www.walter1940.de
Vehicles for Locomotion

Tutorials in english
- From MSTS to Locomotion ---> http://www.walter1940.de/tutorial/msts2loco/
- Wally ---> http://www.walter1940.de/tutorial/wally/
- xml-modding ---> http://www.walter1940.de/tutorial/xml-modding/
crchinoy
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Joined: 01 Feb 2017 09:57

Re: Sprite Creation for Idiots

Post by crchinoy »

Cool, I'll check out that tutorial :)

Now, a very technical question. It's always bothered me that Coal and Iron Ore decay at the station when in real life they can just be stockpiled forever. So I opened up COAL.DAT, but changing the values for decay days and decay rate doesn't seem to have any effect when I replace the original with the modified file in my objdata. I tried zeroes and really large values and the behavior of coal won't change, it still decays at the same rate. Anyone tried to edit cargo decay before?
EDIT: Am I just being dense, and decay rate refers only to the rate at which its value decreases while in transit, that is, with decay rates of zero I can load up a vehicle with cargo and let it sit for eternity before delivering it and its profit is unchanged... NOT that these values affect how long the cargo will last at a station before decaying, and that's instead determined entirely by the station's approval rating for that cargo? If that's the case then scratch everything I said.

Also, I tried manually editing the 2 sprites for coal to make it white instead of black, just as a test, but when I swapped in the file with those sprites, it showed them in-game with all kinds of weird colors instead. I reapplied the locomotion palette to them before repacking the dat file... is there a reason one can't just manually edit sprites by hand? I seem to recall there being one but it would be nice to know.
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