Modification for unit request! Chinese Junk (dzonk).

[mrtn]

I disagree with people here, I don't like full sails the most, I'd rather have just some panels. Not that it's not looking good.

 

[pdescobar]

Well, mrtn, you can always do a partial sail on your own I'm pretty well committed to full sails at this point, although if I can improve the shading I will. Zulu's idea for alternating light and dark panels is interesting; if I can come up with a fairly quick way to do it I'd like to see how it turns out.

 

[pdescobar]

Here's a preview of what an alternate-panel-shading would look like. Single attack direction, first 8 civ colors. The contrast between light colors (0-5) and dark colors (8-13) is intentionally high and can be changed. So, the question is, is this better than the other 2 full sail choices, or do you have another suggestion for improving the look?

 

[Kal-el]

could you make the whole sale the lighter shade?

 

[pdescobar]

Kal-el, once I get all 5 FLCs colored uniformly, I can adjust those shades without much difficulty at all. It's simply a matter of making a couple palette switches since it'll only affect the sails. I actually did make a completely lighter version of attackA as an intermediate step in making the alternate-shading preview.

Later on this evening, I'll have all 5 FLCs colored in the darker uniform shading and I should be able to whip up a light and medium version from those in 5-10 minutes, assuming I don't screw up the shadows like I did on an earlier edit When it's complete and posted I expect there to be light, medium, and dark options all included so the user can choose. Of course, I'd like TVA22's blessing before I publicly post a mod of his unit

The alternate shading would be the only thing requiring a large time investment mainly because basicly every frame of the death animation would require multiple dumps from the paint can; the other animations can use alot of cut & paste because the main ship shape is static in a given direction, but the death flc is more complicated. Thus, I'll probably only go through with that if there's a consensus to have it as an option.

 

[Kal-el]

sounds good.

 

[pdescobar]

Status Update: I have the initial color conversion done, but was not happy with the look on an in-game test so I'm gonna try the light/dark alternating panels as well.

 

[Redking]

You can have my work so far.

I did several of the flcs for TVA's junk with alternating sail panels.

Use it and add to it if you want.

I lost interest because the run animation just did roll with the waves and I couldn't correct it. Run and death need to be done.

Here ya go.

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads4/junk_alt.zip

Also, I fixed some of the shadow effects along the hull of many cels in the ani's.

 

[pdescobar]

Thanks Redking, I'll take a look. I'm just going with the animations as they are, including the bouncing run animation and focusing on getting the colors done nicely; my priority is colors as I barely use animation in the game normally (none of my units run anywhere ). Someone else can always pick up after me and mess with the anims if they want. I did notice some rather large variation in the shadows (some files have smooth graduations, others single color, some of the shadows in the attack anim move around on the other side of the boat) but have almost entirely left them alone so I may incorporate your shadow changes.

I'm about halfway done the death anim with alternating colors, the other 4 files are done, so I'll probably have something for people to mess with by Monday.

 

[TVA22]

You've got my blessing, I think it looks good. I really like how it looks with the lighter colors, but not so much with that dark blue. Thanks for all the hard work!

 

[pdescobar]

Thanks, TVA. The lighter colors do look nice and are closer to the original unit, but on my in-game test they were actually *too* light. I.e., Dark green japan's junk looked like it belonged to light green Greece. I'll probably fiddle with the palette a little more to see if I can remedy that, but the alternating panel version will provide a little something for everyone

 

[TVA22]

ah well that wouldn't bother me, I changed Japan's color to dark red, so that their zero would have the rising sun on it's wings, not some green dohnut. Yet another thing I don't like about the unmodded game, the colors are all crappy!

 

[pdescobar]

Ok, this is just about done. Here is a zip to test. It contains all 5 FLCs in 6 flavors: original, uniformly civ-colored light/medium/dark, and alternating darkciv+lightciv/darkciv+original. Because of the large number of FLCs the zip is about 1.5 MB. When I post the final version, I may break the uniform and alternate into 2 different files and/or may remove the original version depending on whether people feel this is too big.

Here is the zip
Known problems with the zip: The NW and N attack anims have ghost images on the right-side of the frame because FLICster hates me. I removed them once from the PCXs and made sure none of the arrows or shadows was touching the frame boundary, but apparently that wasn't enough. Tomorrow, I shall try again. Also, the zip is just bare files; there are no subfolders. Eventually, everything should be in a "Junk" folder with instructions to rename the ini of the preferred coloration to "Junk.ini" but I didn't do that yet.

If anyone wants to look at them in FLICster, or even better, try them out in a game, I would appreciate any feedback on anything I screwed up or any suggestions regarding coloration.

Additionally, here are composite previews of the 5 FLCs in the 5 different styles, each in 8 civ colors. Note that the West direction is either truncated or completely missing depending on the preview because FLC2Gif seems to be overly fond of animations with frame counts that are multiples of 20... Also, I apparently had a little paste problem on the light/fidget preview.

• 
  [*]
  
  Attack; Alternating Dark & Light
  [*]
  
  Death; Alternating Dark & Original
  [*]
  
  Default: Uniformly Dark
  [*]
  
  Fidget: Uniformly Light
  [*]
  
  Run: Uniformly Medium
  

 

[aaglo]

If this is a vote, I would give mine to the uniformly Light.

 

[zulu9812]

Uniformly Medium...

 

[mrtn]

I tried the Alternating and Original in a game, and you missed a J in the ini, it should be FIDGET=AlternatingDarkWithOrig_JunkFidget.flc , not _unkFidget
I haven't seen an attack in-game yet, but I've seen a beautiful Korean Junk with striped sails sail by.

 

[pdescobar]

Thanks mrtn! I'll be sure to fix that.

 

[Kal-el]

I vote uniformly light!

 

[pdescobar]

I'm actually looking more for feedback on boneheaded omissions like mrtn found or other problems than color preferences Unless someone tells me something like "I tested color scheme X and went blind" I'll probably release all 5 colorations. After all, they're already done and they don't take up *that* much of TF's disk space

 

[mrtn]

Yeah, wasn't that the whole point, that I don't have to use the same look as zulu or aaglo?
One idea though is to try to fix the shadows in the southern view, they're very broad, and extends on both sides of the ship, shouldn't they be only on one side?