UI Tutorial

[Widowmaker]

Sice my lame post a few days ago made it to an official status at this Site
I'd like to take the oppertunity to improve it here..



Main UI Background screen tutorial
Requirements

Perl
tga2res.pl
procidx.pl
irc2res.pl

First how to take a look inside the idx/rsc files.. this way we can catogarize
all files and look what they are resposible for..

ok first just to edit the Main UI screen

first find the apropiate idx/rsc file it is located in the art/recourse folder
in this case the files are called mainbg.* (thank god the names of the files are
quite clear as to what they are) unpack these files with perl and procidx.pl
with the following command :

./perl procidx.pl mainbg.idx

(be sure perl, the edited files and the scripts are in the same dir, and that
you run this undrr the doswindow..)

now there will be a TGA image file created it is 256 color (8bit uncompressed)
and it is flipped.. it is named MAIN_SCRN.TGA

(you dont have to edit this one.. it is just to illustrate how to open up the
idx files to find out how they are named for Falcon)

here how to make the 4 UI's in Falcon

UI's are stored in the Falcon4/art/resource directory

UI's are all 800 * 600 256 colors
TGA 8 bit uncompressed
and flipped (turned upsitedown)
be sure to name the tga files the same
as the *.idx files they should produce

the names of the *.idx files are

Mainscreen- mainbg
Dogfightscreen- dgftbg
Tacticalengagementscreen- tacengbg
Campaignscreen- campbg

use the following lines to produce the idx/rsc files

perl tga2res.pl mainbg.tga MAIN_SCRN
perl tga2res.pl dgftbg.tga DGFT_SCREEN
perl tga2res.pl tacengbg.tga TAC_SCREEN
perl tga2res.pl campbg.tga CB_MAIN_TGA

be aware Falcon4 is case sensitive..

copy the newly produced filepairs into
Falcon4/art/resource folder
and light up falcon


Widowmaker

[Widowmaker]

I made a terrible mistake the last day
these line section I changed

perl tga2res.pl mainbg.tga MAIN_SCRN
perl tga2res.pl dgftbg.tga DGFT_SCREEN
perl tga2res.pl tacengbg.tga TAC_SCREEN
perl tga2res.pl campbg.tga CB_MAIN_TGA

now they are correct

sorry for any confusion I may have caused

Widmak

[Snake Man]

Thats fixed now on the tutorial page, thanks for letting me know. I havent done any UI's myself yet so I dont know about them

PMC TFW
Snake Man

[eruyi]

Hi,

I use Win 2K Pro
I went to DOS command prompt to use following files.

Perl
tga2res.pl
procidx.pl
irc2res.pl

But, none of them don't work with the command line.

What could be wrong?

[Widowmaker]

Did you install perl???

dir you go to the X:/perl/bin directory top run from??

Widmak

[eruyi]

Install Perl? Where do I get perl?

And I don't have a drive X.

Don't understand what "toprun" means..

[Widowmaker]

http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Downloads/ActivePerl/

you need this to run the *.pl files


With X I mean any drive C D E etc..

"dir you go to the X:/perl/bin directory top run from??"

should have been

did you go to the X:/perl/bin direcory to run the scripts from


Widmak

[eruyi]

Hi,

Do you mean I have to move the procidx.pl and main.bg to c:/perl folder and use the DOS prompt?

[Widowmaker]

yep.. well actuall the perl/bin folder
it might not be necessary yet as some scripts need it I suggest
to run all from that directory


Widmak