Ok i have spent a couple of hours on the forums looking for a more “low brainer” method of understading how i could customize my own graphics.
Personally i’m a photoshop artist, and i want to know how i can CREATE and USE custom-made graphics for this project.
i see that the format for graphics is .DEF files, but haven’t found (maybe i’m too blind) how those are made.
because at this moment, most of the graphics used are the ones from the old heroes 3.
and for this project to become totally independent of the old heroes3 - and thus, (hopefully), free, and without breaking any copyright legislations, it would require that EVERY graphic be replaced by a custom-made free equivalent, including towns, sprites, monsters and whatnot, animated or static (something that i am willing to do and help-with quite eagerly)
Therefor I humbly ask of you good folks developing this great project that you post a sticky with how the graphics format for static and animated objects should be - aka gold piles, buildings, buttons etc, so that anyone and everyone is able to understand and contribute/make them.
That is, i’m talking about image size, image transparency/cutout options, image pallete, number of frames for each animation, order of frames and what they are associated with (aka attack, defend, etc) and whatever else information you think might be vital for a good clean output.
I mean most people will start out making something in photoshop - let’s say i want to replace my gremlins with a stupid looking stick-figure man i just made with my tablet.
now that stick-figure will have to “behave” like a gremlin if put in certain situations - he will need attack anims defend anims idle anims take damage anims etc
ok so i go and do those frame by frame untill i think i have covered all the sequences.
He will probably have to be on a “blue” background that gets cut out by the game engine.
So I wind up with a .psd in hand, ready to export in whatever format.
So my question is…NOW WHAT? i could go and export it to pcx or even to avi or gif but what do i do with those. I mean how do i get from a ready made PSD that covers all the animations to a .def file -
this thing needs some explanation for the “neophytes”.
Also, on the long run, if you want for this project to ever truly “break free” sorta say, you will need as much support from the community and volunteers as you can muster, but for that to work some stuff will have to be lowered to a more “retard” level.
The animations should be easily and readily accessible to modify by anyone that desires to do so, therefor (at least the way i envision it), every piece of graphics should be made available for editing/replacing somehow.
That means telling us noobs how we can extract the stuff from the old heroes 3 databases, and
also adapting the project for supporting file-tree based immediate modifications.
(as in i go to data/monster/goblin/attack.whateverfileformat?.def?.pcx?.gif? and replace the default frames there with the ones i just made, go in game and see how my stick man looks, and maybe tweak it if necessary.)
But to do so, One would need the knowledge of the steps required to do the things stated above, which is atm missing.(someone make a tutorial pls.)
Also file-tree based should be the sounds directory too, I have a composer friend that would most likely help with music and SFX, like the monster sounds in combat.
Hope of hearing from you soon with some feedback.
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