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Lethal

Modding Red Alert Help?

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I'm trying to mod Red Alert. Things are going well, but I've run into a few snags.

 

Question 1: Transparent color problem

 

I'm trying to resize the attack dog. The people in Red Alert are grossly over-sized. I've been replacing the hires soldiers with lores ones to compensate. It's done, but the attack dog doesn't seem to have a lores counterpart. I downloaded a program that can batch resize all the dog .tga files. It worked beautifully, except for the consequence of the dog's back being the same color as the transparent background. The dog looks like a pair of legs running around with no body. Is there as way around this? How does the game differentiate between background black and Tanya's hair?

 

Question 2: Red Alert terrain

 

I think the temperate terrain in RA is hideous, so I'd like to recolor it. I've search high and low for how to do this, but have found very little. So far, I know of only two people who have done this: Bullet and Allen262.

 

Allen262 finished an amazing Desert Theater for Red Alert, which you can find here. It's good, but he didn't recolor the trees. Bullet also made a terrain mod in his Perfect RA mod. It's good, but has a few terrain hiccups.

 

How did they do this? The sno and temperat mix files contain two types of files: .shp and .tmp. I can edit .shp just fine with XCC Mixer, but what about .tmp?

 

Also, just on a whim, I recolored all of Allen262's trees in his desert mod. When I replaced his trees and tried the game, everything glitched. The ground turned black and my game froze.

 

Question 3: Red Alert: Star Wars Edition

 

Where can I download this? I'd like to see what they did.

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1. I have created a set of conversion/editing palettes where the background colour and the remappable colours are all changed to be unique on the palette, to prevent them from mixing when saving the files. The background is rose, and the unit remap colours are purple gradients.

http://nyerguds.arsaneus-design.com/cncstu...ple_pals-21.zip

 

2. There's nothing wrong with the RA1 Temperate :P

 

As for your editing question, the problem is that the only existing conversion tool for the RA tmp terrain format (in the RAMix toolkit, if I remember correctly) ignores the terrain type cell information (to determine which cells are rock, water, road, clear terrain, rough terrain) that should be saved into the file, meaning all files created with the tool are seen as open passable terrain. Allen262 spent tons of time editing the terrain type information back into the files manually by copying the headers of the original files with a hex editor.

 

3. Your link leads nowhere, but I got all files of the RA2SW project, as I was one of the people working on it. My job in the project was the creation of SHP files from rendered frames (using my expertise with custom colour palettes), and creating damaged frames for buildings.

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1. Those pallettes will certainly come in handy. Thank you very much!

 

2. This sounds quite complicated. I'm a patient person, so the workload doesn't scare me, but I'm not familiar with hex editing. How will I know which lines of text to copy and where to paste them? If I run through a few hex editing tutorials, will all this be self-explanatory?

 

3. Yeah, I goofed up my link. This is a so called "lost" C&C site. The project was abandoned several years ago and all the files were supposedly released, but I can't find the mod available for download anywhere. I'd like to see it because the screenshots look incredible.

empire.jpg

Why was the project abandoned, if I may ask? You guys had a good thing going.

 

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lol, the old Pisstrooper.

 

PuMa found it funny to make it pee as one of its Idle frames. I remember taking screenshots of it peeing on a tesla coil XD

 

But yeah, I got all of those. I'll post them later when I got some more time.

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One thing I hate about Red Alert is the odd unit proportions. Compared to my guys the dogs looked like horses. Your pallettes saved me hours worth of work. :thumbsup:

 

2ia7jeq.png

 

Slight detail was lost in the resize, but at least my dogs are the right size now.

 

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Your pallettes saved me hours worth of work. :thumbsup:

That's what they're for :D

Could you release the SHP? I'm sure more people would be interested in this resize. Oh, and did you remember to also change the dog projectile SHP?

 

 

Here's the RA2SW stuff. Most of the interesting SHPs are in the incomplete/tmp/shp folder.

http://nyerguds.arsaneus-design.com/mods/r..._everything.rar (14.5 MiB)

 

I separated the sound effects/music folders because it was just too big.

http://nyerguds.arsaneus-design.com/mods/ra2sw_alpha_sfx.rar (6.6 MiB)

http://nyerguds.arsaneus-design.com/mods/r...alpha_music.rar (17.7 MiB)

 

2. This sounds quite complicated. I'm a patient person, so the workload doesn't scare me, but I'm not familiar with hex editing. How will I know which lines of text to copy and where to paste them?

No such thing as "lines of text" when hex editing. It's all binary data. Raw bytes. You'll at least need to familiarize yourself with hexadecimal notation of numbers before you can start on that.

 

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That's what they're for :D

Could you release the SHP? I'm sure more people would be interested in this resize. Oh, and did you remember to also change the dog projectile SHP?

 

Yeah, I resized all three dog SHPs (even the one where the dog gets electrocuted). I'll post the resized dog in a day or two. Right now I've got work to do.

 

Also, thanks for everything. I'm eager to check out that unfinished star wars mod when I get a free moment.

 

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For anyone who wants to download a lores attack dog, it can be found here.

 

The fire in the frames where the attack dog gets burned has been recolored to match the new graphical explosions and flames in my mod. If it bothers anyone, I can fix it back to the way it was.

 

I checked out your Star Wars mod, Nyerguds, and it looks incredible. Both the AT-AT and AT-ST were my personal favorites. And I must say, the Pisstrooper was pretty funny.

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Hm, the AT-AT and AT-ST were both converted from Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds, if I remember correctly. Most of the other units and buildings (especially those on the screenshot you posted) were rendered by Suricata though. But like so many people from the old days, he just fell off the world one day.

 

...which was probably one of the reasons why the project was abandoned.

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Hm, the AT-AT and AT-ST were both converted from Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds, if I remember correctly. Most of the other units and buildings (especially those on the screenshot you posted) were rendered by Suricata though.

 

I wondered why the graphical quality differed. I just figured the AT-AT/AT-ST were early attempts. Suricata's units are refined and sleek. The walkers are more pixelated and flaky. When they move, the pixels seem to fuzz. I played around with fixing it yesterday, but it's out of my league.

 

But like so many people from the old days, he just fell off the world one day.

 

If his real name is Tim, then he might have landed here.

 

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The quality is different simply because they were resized in 256-colour mode. that always pixelates stuff.

 

And yep, that seems to be him. His name is indeed Tim. You can see his old hotmail address on the old RA2SW site is "timdavies79" :P

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The quality is different simply because they were resized in 256-colour mode. that always pixelates stuff.

 

And yep, that seems to be him. His name is indeed Tim. You can see his old hotmail address on the old RA2SW site is "timdavies79" tongue.gif

 

Yeah, thats definatly me (Even though I am a couple years late, but noticed quite alot of traffic coming from this post all of a sudden) ;-)

 

Noticed the traffic on my blog from the link :-P

 

As Nyerguds pointed out, the project came to an end when Imoved on. What actually happened behind the scenes was that I got a new computer. At the time my machine could not actually run any decent games, so I took to modding what would run on my computer at the time, So when I replaced that computer I moved onto brighter pastures! I remeber at the time aswell there was quite alot of turmoil in the CnC community with some websites closing down, community drama with FreeCNC as well as many sites changing thier hosting packages. This all kind of led to the project stalling. Was definatly fun to work on and it's a shame it never really got finished off to the extent that it could of been, but that's how it goes sometimes.

 

The models were actually fun to work on, as the details of the models had to be exagerated to take into account the small size of the image files, as can be seen below in a render of the models I made for it.

 

starwarsships.jpg

Edited by Tim Davies

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Hey, Tim! How have you been doing? :D

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I'm good, not really modding as much these days, I've been having a dabble with the unity games engine and importing some of my models into it, which look pretty cool! I ended up going back to school, just about to finish my BA know in concept development. Hopefully once my studiesare complete I'll have more sparetme for getting back into modding again and getting a name for myself again! ;-)

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Nice, nice. I'm currently Code Monkey in a small company making software for (mostly French) hospitals, and beside that I'm mostly lost to the ponies madness.

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For anyone who wants to download a lores attack dog, it can be found here.

 

The fire in the frames where the attack dog gets burned has been recolored to match the new graphical explosions and flames in my mod. If it bothers anyone, I can fix it back to the way it was.

This would be a nice extra for Irans patch, albeit with original explosions and flames. Funny, never noticed the horse dogs before :P

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That's because the infantry is equally gigantic without my small infantry patch.

 

Pity the link is broken...

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