Armour Resource Pack

WORK IN PROGRESS!

I've been playing around with making some new armour assets. Nothing fancy - just some batch-done colour swaps - but it's enough to allow for some diversity of armour types for modders.

At the moment, I've done one set for Jackal and two for Wolf. I'm planning on doing some for Sentinel and Predator as well.

Some pics:

Jackal 2.0

Jackal 3.0:

Wolf 2.0

Wolf 3.0

Sentinel 2.0:

Sentinel 3.0:

Sentinel 4.0:

Predator 2.0:

Predator 3.0:

Ground Combat Images (with original armour types for comparison):

The downloads will be going up tomorrow when I have access to an internet connection better suited to uploading several hundred megabites of files. The download pack will contain all the relevant files needed for the new armours to be used in game (using the modular system for X:CE) so it will be easy to add them in with whatever values you want. I've included in this files and images for dealing with corpses, too!

NOTE HOWEVER THAT THIS IS A RESOURCE PACK AND NOT A MOD - IT DOES NOT ACTUALLY ADD NEW ARMOURS INTO THE GAME!

I'm planning on releasing a mod which uses the new armour sprites at some point, but that might not be for a while yet and I figured these might be useful for people in the meantime.

Any questions, suggestions or problems, feel free to post them here.

Thanks 'Kabill, I can't wait.

Might be longer than I thought to get stuff uploaded as I think I'm going to finish all of them and do it all in one go. I'm actually almost done, so next few days is likely.

Do you have the animation XML files that allow these armors to appear in-game setup? I did the same thing some time ago when I was experimenting with new armors, but when i went to actually get the armor to appear in GC, i was met with invisible sprites because I lacked proper XML files to support them. Merely curious.

Yeah, I've produced sprites for all the new armours too and made relevant changes to the animation spectres so they work in ground combat. The last screenshot is taken from in-game, so it's all functional.

I think you should seriosly consider using an algorithm or method for compression.From what I can tell one single armor we add in XNT weights around 350 MB and that's with slightly compression without it,I think it's around 400MB.And from what I can see you made for all armors.How much does it weight ? 2 of 3 GB without compression ?

Assuming this is just palette swaps, this should really be handled programatically rather than as extra external data (and a load of it as it happens). It'd also allow some soldier customization in the way the Firaxis game allows.

I think the engine's TTexture::Lock() functionality should allow that. I can't say it'd be anywhere near the top of my todo list to try that though. Maybe Solver or bonds0097 might be more interested.

Yeah, it's about 3gb in all.

I don't really know anything about image compression, so I don't really know what to do with it. I thought that repacking it as a .pfp file like the unit sprites start as would help here, but Chris says that this doesn't actually change the size of the files. (I'm a bit confused by this, actually, as the Units .pfp is only ~130mb while the uncompressed sprites come to 1.7gb, though maybe the .pfp file is drawing them from somewhere else?)

He did, however, recommend a program that might be useful but I don't know when I'll have time to look at it. If anyone has any suggestions or knows what they're doing, help would be great.

Alternatively, if something similar could be done using stuff in the game engine, then that's even better (but outside my power at that point).

I use a PNG compressor called "Tiny PNG", they have a free online convertor or a paid Photoshop plugin. I've found it can cut the size of the files down almost 70%. It does this by removing alot of the metadata and making the PNGs Indexed instead of RGB colorspace. The quality reduction is almost unnoticeable.

I'd be happy to work with you Kabill to try and compress the images down further, I would love to use these armors in Xenophobia as an optional feature, I wouldn't want to force a 3gb download on anyone, hehe. But, I certainly dont mind an extra 3gb of data, hehe.

Shoot me a PM if you wanna team up.

Well, I was directed to some compression software by Sentelin and have found something which seems to be able to reduce the files down to over half their original size (~350mb went down to ~150mb in the test I did) which I think is good enough (final version will likely be ~1.5gb).

There might be more powerful software available, but looking through them a lot of the png compressors seem either unable to deal with batch processing (which is necessary because there's hundreds of sprite sheets to do), work through a console (which I could probably deal with if I had the time to learn how to use it, but I don't), or don't work on a Windows operating system. So I think this will do (but thanks for the offer anyway).

Depending on what Solver says, I might see about uploading both a single download with all the relevant stuff as well as separate downloads for each armour type. That way, if someone wants to use the whole package they can download it all together and more or less ready to go. Or if a modder is interested only in some of the armour types then they can just download the ones they want to use.

Well, I was directed to some compression software by Sentelin and have found something which seems to be able to reduce the files down to over half their original size (~350mb went down to ~150mb in the test I did) which I think is good enough (final version will likely be ~1.5gb).

There might be more powerful software available, but looking through them a lot of the png compressors seem either unable to deal with batch processing (which is necessary because there's hundreds of sprite sheets to do), work through a console (which I could probably deal with if I had the time to learn how to use it, but I don't), or don't work on a Windows operating system. So I think this will do (but thanks for the offer anyway).

Depending on what Solver says, I might see about uploading both a single download with all the relevant stuff as well as separate downloads for each armour type. That way, if someone wants to use the whole package they can download it all together and more or less ready to go. Or if a modder is interested only in some of the armour types then they can just download the ones they want to use.

Cool, glad you found a compressor!

This is now completed and has been uploaded. Link etc. can be found here:

http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/11878-X-CE-0-26-Armour-Resource-Pack

Also, I built a mod to go with it. Details at:

http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/11879-X-CE-Cybernetic-Armour

This is now completed and has been uploaded. Link etc. can be found here:

http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/11878-X-CE-0-26-Armour-Resource-Pack

Also, I built a mod to go with it. Details at:

http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/11879-X-CE-Cybernetic-Armour

Nice, because this is a "resource pack", I assume you are giving permission for repacking into other mods? Just want clarity that its cool that we can use the assets and give you credit

Yes, you're welcome to use it. I actually meant to put that in the mod description and forgot. I'll go do that now.

(If you're using many of the armour types, I suggest not actually packaging them with the mod and getting people to download the resource pack separately, as it'll save you having to upload the files).

Whooohooo Thanks Kabill.

hi kabill i was about to open a new thread for asking something but you are one of the most experimented modders arround the forum so i want to ask you something, did you know if is possible to make this procces (the recolouring of the sprite) but instead of changing the color of the armour...to changing the color of the WEAPON?for example...making a new sprite of the basic armour but with a blue/red/orange/white/purple with sparks version of the balistic rifle???. Is the same process?, or just more tedious or very difficult or completely impossible >_<?

I don't know. You'd have to do something different/more complicated than what I did at the very least. There's at least two problems:

1) To do just the weapons you need to be able to localise the weapon part of the sprites and I don't know if you could do that with a batch process like I used to make the new armour. You might be able to select by colour first, but that will probably get you other parts of the sprites as well.

2) With colour replacement you actually need some colour there to start with. Most of the weapons on the sprites are black or grey, which you can't really do anything with by adjusting the hue. As such, you'd be fairly limited in terms of what you could do. Your best bet would be to start with the alien weapons as they've got proper colour, but then you're still quite limited with what you can do.

Bear in mind, however, that I know next to nothing about this kind of stuff - what I did with the armour is more or less as simple as it possible could be and a proper graphics artist will be able to give you a better answer.

Haha its great to finally be able to put armours in my Mod.

Kabill you have done a wonderful job. Now are free to make additional armours using your resource pack as a template thanks so much.

I am already using the Jackal2 armour as a kind of bomb disposal adaptation. Provides better protection but at cost to visual range etc.

Only thing is I suck at the 2d Graphics part. Can any body do better than this? (not difficult) and if so would you be prepared to share you results.

Haha its great to finally be able to put armours in my Mod.

Kabill you have done a wonderful job. Now are free to make additional armours using your resource pack as a template thanks so much.

I am already using the Jackal2 armour as a kind of bomb disposal adaptation. Provides better protection but at cost to visual range etc.

Only thing is I suck at the 2d Graphics part. Can any body do better than this? (not difficult) and if so would you be prepared to share you results.

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Teletubby armour?