Opening Menu Questions

[euskingc]

I have some dummy questions about the opening menu... the background picture aside, I noticed that in vanilla bts the opening menu is a kind of translucent blue, whereas in fall from heaven it is kind of a translucent brown.

So where is the colour of this menu controlled from?
What file(s) are involved?
Can it be made more or less translucent?

 

[God-Emperor]

Some info for you, possibly even useful.

There are a bunch of .tga file in the Resources folder. Some of them may be relevant, and are mentioned below. The relevant ones for the main menu are likely to define the shape of the buttons and the texture of them, but not the color.

The theme files (.thm extension) down under Resource/Theme control, at least mostly, which of the .tga file are used for what purpose.

One of the two important ones for this is the file Civ4Theme_Common.thm. In that file there are color definitions for things. One that may be very useful for you is this one:

GColor	.BG							=	GColor(117, 82, 44,217)		: GFC_Control_Color;	//Set for dynamic color change

That is the line from FFH. In regular Bts it uses "GColor( 69, 93,156,217)". If you enter those values into a color choser, like in Paint, you can see that the FFH one is brown and the BtS one is blue. It doesn't look exactly like the colors I expect, so the blending with the tga files presumably has an effect.

The 4 numbers are the values for red, green, blue, and alpha (opacity, lower it to make it more transparent). Note that this same value is used in some other places too.

That definition is referred to as "SF_CtrlTheme_Civ4_Control_Color_BG" in the places where it is used (the ".BG" one the line is appened to the "SF_CtrlTheme_Civ4_Control_Color" in the earlier line that reads "with SF_CtrlTheme_Civ4_Control_Color" but becomes "_BG" for no known reason - whoever invented the theme file format was not big on consistency: things are dfined using "." but used using "_" to separate the parts).

The other theme file that is used for this is Civ4Theme_Custom.thm. In that file is a section that starts like so:

	//Main menu selections panel (Blue main panel)
	style SF_CtrlTheme_Civ4_Control_Panel_Main_Style

In there you can see that it mentions "Civ4/Custom/main_menu01.tga". That fodler is under the Resources folder.
The next section after that starts like

	//Main start menu panel (Blue start menu panel)
	style SF_CtrlTheme_Civ4_Control_Panel_MainStart_Style

This one mentiones "Civ4/Custom/main_start.tga".

Those define the shapes of things, and possibly affect the transparency.

 

[euskingc]

Am I to understand then that to change the colour one simply needs to change the RGB values in this line in Civ4Theme_Common.thm?

GColor .BG = GColor(117, 82, 44,217) : GFC_Control_Color; //Set for dynamic color change


If that is the case, I've run into an issue... change them as I may, the colour of the opening menu is still blue...

It seems I've left the parking brake on...

Some kind of virtual store issue or something, perhaps?

Bear with me, this is all a little foreign to me...

Addendum:
I've gone so far as to replace the entire resource folder in my mod with the one from ffh2... just to test... but still blue.

 

[euskingc]

In case anyone else has the same issue, as strange as it seems to me there is indeed an 'on switch' to let it know to use the new items in the resource folder. Actually two.

I wondered if there wasn't perhaps something that needed to be changed in the xml files and indeed there is... the file in question is:
CIV4ArtDefines_Misc.xml

The portion in question that needs to be changed falls in here:
<MiscArtInfo>
<Type>DEFAULT_THEME_NAME</Type>
<Path>Mods/(yourmodnamehere)/Resource/Civ4.thm</Path>
<fScale>0.0</fScale>
<NIF>None</NIF>
<KFM>None</KFM>
</MiscArtInfo>

The second file that needs to be altered (at least I think they both need to be) is the /resource/civ4.thm file...

// *** Control Bitmap Theme file

// Set the resource
resource_path "Mods/(yourmodnamehere)/Resource";

// Setup common properties
include "Mods/(yourmodnamehere)/Resource/Themes/Civ4/Civ4Theme.thm";


I wonder if there isn't perhaps a tutorial on creating/editing themes? If there is, and someone knows of it, I'd love very much a link to it, and if I find one first I'll post it here in case anyone else comes across this thread in their search for answers...

In the meantime, my sincere thanks to you, God-Emperor. I have my doubts that I'd ever have been able to figure this out on my own completely, without direction and knowledge such as you rendered so kindly.

 

[God-Emperor]

You're welcome.

I know I have posted about the theme files before. The adjustments you mentioned had to be done in Final Frontier Plus to get it to use its own files instead of the ones in the regular Final Frontier mod so that you could have FFP without FF, which is one of the reasons I know a little about the theme files.

There is actually a utility for changing interface colors out there made by Lemon Merchant, the Civ4 HUD Color Utility. This would be modifying thigns in the theme files. That changes several of the theme settings, I expect, to get the in-game interface colors changed.

 

[euskingc]

Thanks again! That may prove useful during the refining process... right now just trying to rush this baby to market hehe