The Descent Chronicles Uses this FAQ with the Permission of the Author
Table of Contents
Appendix A - Table of .PCX files (BIG FILE)
Introduction
What is the Purpose?
This FAQ was written at the request of Zarathud, respected DCer, a long time ago. Apparently someone liked a few of the skin mods I had created with the help of John Hanton so they asked me to write up a document to teach other people how to create their own. I have to admit that if it weren't for John, I probably would have no idea how to do any of this. Well, anyway I hope that I get it all right and you understand how to do it, too.
Questions or Comments?
Obviously no good FAQ is ever completed on the first try, so I have added this section so that you know who to contact in case you find an error or just have some info that should be added to this FAQ. I look forward to all (both good and bad) comments, and I promise to write back if someone does send me a question or comment. My e-mail address is: jpickell@campuscw.net. I also work on the FreeSpace Reference Project at Ross 128.
Getting Started
What Programs do I use?
I can bet that there will be much speculation as to which programs are the best to use for doing all of the different design steps, but I have to say that I do have my own favorites. Here is a list of different programs you can use (although don't limit yourself to only the following, if you know of a better program, by all means please use it and let me know what you use so I can add it):
Adobe Photoshop-
Obviously not the cheapest program, or the easiest to get a hold of if you don’t own it, but I do consider it to be one of the best. Of course if you do happen to get a hold of a copy of Photoshop (preferably 4.0 or above) it would not be complete with Eye Candy… Eye Candy is a plugin for Photoshop that allows you to do more than just what Photoshop alone allows you to do. The effects include fire, smoke, brass, and many many more. If you got it, use it, it is what I recommend.
Paint Shop Pro-
Not one of the most perfect programs on the market, but it does do almost as much as Photoshop does and it is a lot easier to get a hold of. I realize many people would contend with me on that last statement, but I really do feel that it is not as good as Photoshop. Sorry. However you can download a free trial from www.jasc.com. It is only a thirty day trial but it is free after all and can do just about everything we are going to talk about in the next sections anyway.
Illustrator-
Now here is a damn fine program. It has all of the drawing ability of both Photoshop and PSP combined. You will not find a better 2D drawing program on the market. However it is very expensive and very hard to get a hold of. I don't expect most people to actually have it so I won't go too much into detail here.
VPViewer32-
If you don't already have this program then what are you doing reading this FAQ? Every person who is going to do anything at all with FreeSpace needs to have a copy of this wonderful program. The program was designed by HH (from descent-freespace.com) to allow everyone the ability to look at what makes up the .VP files. These files are where you will find all of the .PCX files mentioned in the following sections. You can download a copy from www.descent-freespace.com right off of the front page! Get it or don't bother reading on any further.
Acani-
This command line program is needed to convert .PCX files into the .ani format that FreeSpace recognizes for animation files. I won't go to in depth on how this program works here, because you won't need it for most of the stuff that we are going to do, but if you want to go even further in redesigning FreeSpace you will need this program. This will be explained later under Advanced.
While there are many hundreds of drawing programs there is only one VPViewer32 program. There is talk of programs to come that will allow you to edit the .pof files and even create your own .vp file. I only mention this for the benefit of those who are looking for a more complete redesign of the FreeSpace environment for their upcoming missions or even campaigns. For all of those who are about to embark on this journey I wish you luck!
What files do I use?
The main files that you are able to edit are .PCX files. They are stored in the main game data .vp file. The ship files are kept in the maps dir and the interface files are kept in the interface dir. Due to the enormously large amount of .PCX files kept in these two directories I have conveniently added an Appendix to this FAQ that has the complete listing of all of the .PCX files that I could find.
What do I do know?
If you have been following this FAQ since the beginning you are probably wondering, "what do I do now"? Well if you don't have any of the programs mentioned above then you need to download them or get copies of them. If you already have the programs necessary, then the main task is to get out the files that you need.
But before you do that you need to decide what you want to edit. Do you want to customize an Apollo? Give a Thoth a mean look? Or do you want to redesign the look of the Galatae? Each one of these requires different files and different methods of doing what needs to be done, so it is very important that you have a clear mind of what you want to accomplish. Even if you are planning on redesigning the layout of the FreeSpace program you need to start at the beginning and sure that you know exactly what you want to see done and what it will take to get there.
Okay you have decided on what you want to do, but know you are probably wondering again, "now what do I do?" Easy. Open VPViewer32 and look at the main game data VP file. When you open it up you will see a lot of directories listed on the left, however you only need to get into one of two directories. If you are editing a ship then you want to get into the maps dir and look at the large number of files for the different ships. We will go into detail about the reason there are a lot of different .PCX files for the different ships, but for right now just stare in awe. Once you have the directory open, quickly scan over the table of .PCX files (found in the appendix) for the ones that you will need in order to do the editing. Have VPViewer32 extract these files to the directory you are going to use to store these files. Just use a temporary dir for now, we will go over where to put them later.
Now that we have the files necessary for editing it is now time to get down to business. You will need to open the drawing program of choice and bring up each of the files that you have extracted. Each file that you open will need to be converted into a RGB color format (or in the case of Paint Shop Pro you need to increase the color depth). This is important because for the trouble it takes to edit them it is easier when you don't have to fight the palette that the .PCX files is using. You find it easier in other cases to use this palette but for sake of time lets just go with the RGB format.
Basics
The Three Dimensions
As you may have noticed already there are many .PCX files for each ship. In fact if you look closely most fighters and smaller ships each have three. If you have already opened up the files then you can already see why there are at least three. Each .PCX file is used for the different views of each ship at the distances specified in the .tbl files (I won't elaborate here for fear of confusing you totally). The letter a signifies that it is the close-up view. The letter b signifies a medium view distance. The letter c represents a far away perspective.
There are however many ships, and especially Capital Ships that you will notice have more than just three. The easiest one to recognize is the Ursa bomber. It actually has 5 files for the different views. It has two .PCX files for the close-up and two for the medium view perspective, with a single one for the far away look. Although there are many bombers the size of the Ursa, they all fit into one .PCX file for each view. The Ursa's unique configuration prevented this from being possible. Capital ships have anywhere from 7 to 15 different .PCX files. The problem is that while the letters signify what perspective they fall into the numbers have no bearing as to which part of the ship you are looking at. Just something to keep in mind when you are wanting to take on the daunting task of editing capital ships skins.
Capital Ship Blues
As I had mentioned before the hardest part of working on Capital ships is that they do not follow a convenient order of .PCX files. Let's take for instance the Aten Cruiser. The Aten actually has two .PCX files that are tile sets for the upper and lower body. The rest are merely the sticking out pieces of the Cruiser. This makes it extremely hard to edit, because you can’t put a logo on the tileset since when you look at it through the viewer it would be repeated ten fold across the face of the Aten.
But this rule does not apply to all of the capital ships. As most people know the Bastion and Galatae are modified versions of the basic Orion Destroyer. The Orion is pretty easy to edit. However It does seem like the Terran ships were actually the only capital ships designed to be edited. Both of the cruisers and the two destroyers are easily edited to add either text of logos to the side of their massive hulls. The Shivan and Vasudan capital ships are however far from simple when it comes to adding things to the hulls. They have so many curves or just plain repeated patterns that if you put the text or logo on one .PCX tile you will see it repeated several times all around the hull...I have not played much with capital ships due to this factor so I look forward to anyone who has conquered these odds and have customized a Shivan or Vasudan capship.
Quick and Easy
Well enough of the depressing talk. Let's get down to what we are here for. Lets edit a Ulysses. Let's make it a gradient color from red to blue.. he he he.. That should look very interesting! Well first lets pull the files from the table (found in the appendix) I see that we will need the files: fighter01-01a.PCX, fighter01-01a.PCX, and fighter01-01c.PCX. I will be using Photoshop and will include my examples in this document.
Once I have them pulled up in Photoshop I go to the image>mode menu and change the mode to RGB. This allows for multi layer editing. Since all we are doing is a basic coloring of the entire ship, all we need to do is add one single layer to each of the pics. I generally leave the layer at 100% opacity so that I can easily edit the transparency later. Now comes the fun part.
A gradient is the easiest tool to work with when working on skins. You can put a gradient across the entire skin layout and it will completely change the way the ship looks. The best part is that if you move the gradient you get a completely different look again. Even if you used the same colors! The way the skins wrap around the models is what determines how they can look so differently and yet have the same gradient colors applied. (what's cooler than that is applying text in areas it doesn't fit...looks like spiderwebs sometimes)
I decided to do a gradient from the bottom left corner to the upper right corner. This is an easy pattern to repeat across each of the skins. Of course once you have placed the gradient in the new layer you can't see the background anymore. So we need to adjust the opacity of the layer. Each program does this differently so read the manual or the help file that comes with each program to learn how. I decided to go with 50% opacity since it allowed for a more distinct colorization without taking away from the original ship's looks. One thing I should warn you about here is that you will see many bright spots on the design of the ships. These are where the special effects go in the game. Lights, laser fire, missile launches all come from there areas so make sure that you don't overly cover these areas. It just makes them look funny in the game.
Now with the gradients in place and the opacity set to what I wanted them to be I now need to save them so that I can view them in the FreeSpace tech room. Each pic must be now reconverted back into the indexed color palette. Photoshop allows you to do this by going into the image>mode menu again and selecting indexed colors. I'm not sure how PSP and Illustrator do it so you may want to take a look at the manual or help file. I usually just let the index be 8bit with 256 colors adaptive. It just doesn't seem to affect the overall outcome very much when I do it that way. Once you have saved the pics we now have to put then where FreeSpace will be able to find them. For ships the dir they should be placed in is freespace/data/maps (if your FreeSpace dir is called something else then that goes in front of the data/maps). Go check out your handing work in the tech room of the FreeSpace game. Pat yourself on the back for a wonderful job!
Intermediate
How to do a Logo
Now many people have asked me to add logos to ships and in fact I used to have a dragoon logo on my Herc back when I was part of the Ronin Squadron. Man, those were the days. But adding logos is definitely the next step in the evolutionary chain of ship skin editing. Almost every squadron out there has their own unique logo that makes them stand out from the others. However there are some things to remember about doing logos (and text, but that is for later). While you will be able to see the logo on any ship that you have an .PCX file for in your maps dir, no one else will be able to see it unless they have the same file in their maps dir. While this works well for squadrons since they can have each person have a .PCX file placed in each members maps file, you can't have more than one in the dir at time. Nothing has been released by Volition yet that allows that that kind of editing. We can only hope that they might come up with something.
Okay, so you have a logo and now want to put in on your ship. The first thing to remember is that your logo is probably larger than the open spot on the ship you want to put it on. So be prepared for the fact that you may have to shrink your logo quite a bit. I remember when I did this one logo edit for Admiral Seven, it took me two hours just to get the shrinking right to make sure that you could still make out the squadron logo. Basically it comes down to this. If you paint program allows you measure pixels, then you want to measure the number of pixels across and down of the area that you want to put the logo into. Next is to shrink the logo pic down to the same dimensions. If the dimensions are too small then you may need to rethink your logo or have someone draw you a smaller logo. Either way it can be a hassle at times.
The hardest part of all is making sure that you put the logo in the right place. Due to the fact that many ships aren't as nicely placed as the Ulysses, you may find that what you think is the bottom of the ship may just as likely be the top or even the sides of the ship. This part could take you several hours of painstakingly placing, saving, viewing, and going back to fix the location of the logo. But it is pretty cool when you do get it placed just right. It can give the ship that personal touch you always wanted.
Adding Text to a Ship
While I don't really recommend doing this on small ships such as fighters and bombers, It does work extremely well on Capital ships, cargo ships, and shuttles. I have put text on an Apollo once. In fact I even have a copy in the Appendix. If you look closely it says "Kick me." I did this at the request of Tom Lewis. This is a good example why text is not really recommended on fighters. You can make it look good after hours of work, but It doesn't look as cool as when you fly by a Galatae that says "Kick Me" across the ass end of it. But if you can make it work I most certainly applaud you. I don't think that I need to explain how to add the text since it is as easy as it was above to add a gradient to the ship.
Advanced
What else can be changed?
This question is easily answered by looking at the large number of .PCX files there are in the game. Even I didn't realize how many total files there were until I started on the table. If I remember the count right I believe that there are nearly 1,000 files all told. Most of the .PCX files are the interface .PCX files. Everything from the main hall to every area where you go to in FreeSpace has a .PCX file for it. I have also listed all of the credits images in case you want to create your own credits.
In the next couple of sections I will go into some detail as to what can be done and what can't be done about changing the look and feel of FreeSpace. I'm not sure how Volition would feel about this, so if you wanted to drastically change the way FreeSpace looks, please ask them first so they don't back and yell and scream at me.
Main Hall Ramifications
While I would personally love to see the bridge of a Shivan Cruiser, or even a Vasudan capital ship, I realize the incredible amount of time it would take to design one. There are many things to keep in mind when redesigning the main halls, or even the multiple layers of each area that you go through in FreeSpace. All of them contain .ani files (yes those horrid things that have been driving people crazy on the FDL list). The nice part is that each area comes with a mask file, designated with a –m. But with all that in mind, wouldn't it be exciting to start say the Awakenings campaign with a different front hall then the normal FreeSpace?
Missile, Engine and Laser Design
Probably one of the coolest things that we can edit is the laser, engine and missile trails. The laser's editability comes in the form of the laserglow.PCX. It is a simple little orb of color that is then stretched out, as far as I can tell, to create the laser's different effects. The engine has two different .PCX files to edit. One is thruster and the other is thrusterglow. Missile trails however are the coolest ones. They follow a basic pattern, but you can add anything you want to as a pattern and it comes out awesome!.
Ship and Weapons Mods
With all of the new ships and weapons being created I foresee a need to create matching ships and weapons outlines. There has been talk of doing so on the FDL list recently. Pastel was kind enough to even provide us with a guideline on how to make the .ani files for those know how to make the .PCX files necessary. I will provide more in the future on how to do this, but for right now all I can give you is Pastel's words:
"The $Icon field determines which little weapon icon to use for loading your ship (the actual thing you drag in and out of slots). This is a four-image ani, 56x24 pixels, 30 fps, with pure green corresponding to transparent. The first image is the icon in the normal state (i.e. weapon available, unselected). The second image is the mouse-over state (i.e. the cursor is hovering over the icon, but it is still unselected). The third image is the icon when selected and dragging, and the fourth is the icon when it is not a valid weapon for the current ship (unselectable). Look in freespace.vp, interface dir, for all the included icons. Valid ones are IconGun??.ani and IconMissle??.ani. For additional Silent Threat anis, look in mdisk.vp, interface directory. The $Anim field is what is displayed on the right when the weapon is selected (i.e. the spinning weapon.) This is a 90 frame, 15 fps ani, 244x214 resolution. The first 30 frames are used for drawing the weapon (the white glowing stuff) and the final 60 frames are cycled to show the weapon spinning. THIS field is what you see when you select the weapon, NOT what you put in +Title and +Description. Unfortunately, there is no way in which you can simply have FreeSpace display this instead of the ani. Therefore, if you add a new weapon, you have to make a new 90-frame ani to go along with it. You can get the ani quite small simply by using the same pcx for all 90 frames: that should compress very well. Use the font Volition used (you can find it at one of those FS development web sites) and extract the background, and you should be set. However, you'll still get that "itemdraw" wav playing, even though no weapon is being drawn.
BTW, included weapon description anis are LoadGun??.ani and LoadMissle??.ani, also in freespace.vp interface dir. For additional Silent Threat anis, look in mdisk.vp, interface directory. This similar to the situation with ships, as ships also use a special ani (120 frames: instead of the +Title and +Description fields, with one exception: In multiplayer, Volition apparently needed space for the chat interface, so they show the +title and +description field info in a text box instead of showing the spinning ship ani. For single player, however, it still uses the ani; no way around that. BTW, the format for $Ship_anim in ships.tbl: 136 frames, 15 fps, 633x224 res. First 36 frames used to draw ship, the final 100 are cycled to spin it. Volition-included anis are ssfighter??.ani and ssbomber??.ani, also in freespace.vp interface dir. For additional Silent Threat anis, look in mdisk.vp, interface directory."
Appendix A - Table of .PCX files (BIG FILE)
Back to Top of Page
To Zarathud's Ship Texture MOD Guide
