WA terrains for WormsDC

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WA terrains for WormsDC

Post by Squirminator2k » Thu Feb 01, 2007 7:37 pm

I've spent a few hours today very carefully converting the terrain styles from Worms Armageddon to a format that Worms - The Directors Cut can use. Rather than ripping the graphics from the game itself (not within my capabilities, unfortunately) I have instead used the Page of Light to get game elements.

WormsDC's terrains are limited to 16 colours, and the first 6 colours have to be particular values as they are used by other elements in the game. Here are the specific palette requirements:

00 = dark, transparent
01 = white or near white (for the text and some weapon sprites)
02 = Pink or near pink (for the worms themselves)
03 = Any
04 = Lighter variant of 03 (03 and 04 used for crate colour)
05 = Any
06 = Lighter variant of 05 (05 and 06 used for mine colour)
07-15 = Any

Using a combination of Paint Shop Pro 7 in Windows and DeluxePaint IV AGA on the Amiga, I've so far converted two terrain styles:

Terrain One: ART
Art is a very vivid, colourful landscape that shows off what the PC is capable of. Unfortunately this doesn't translate well when you reduce the number of colours, but I think I did a good job.

Here's the template I made, in both 256-colour and 16-colour format:
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As you can see I did have to make one other concession - the "grass" colour had to change from pink to blue. When the colours were reduced I was left with a rather horrible brown smudge which didn't look particularly pleasing. I chose to change it to the light blue, which looks rather nice in game:

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(Note: the arrow above Sheepish' head in the first shot is supposed to be red and white, however it does not display so when emulated in WinUAE. It shows properly on an actual Amiga, though.)
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Post by Squirminator2k » Thu Feb 01, 2007 7:40 pm

Terrain Two: CHEESE
I had hoped this one would be easier, as it's mainly yellows. I was sadly mistaken. The terrain itself looks rather splendid although some of the objects I chose didn't convert quite as nicely. It still looks rather good overall, however.

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All very good, but with one problem - no pink colour! I ended up slightly increasing the brightness of the peachy red colour and assigning that to be the worms' colouring.

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(The water colour looks a little bright, so I may adjust that.)
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Post by Squirminator2k » Thu Feb 01, 2007 8:03 pm

Interesting things I have learnt from doing these conversions so far:
  • W2/WA/WWP terrain "textures" are 4 times wider than Worms/WormsDC/WormsUtd terrains, and 8 times taller.
  • WA's girder segments are exactly twice the size of the old W/WDC/WU girder segments, and overly rather nicely when resized down.
  • 16 colours is really not a lot, but also isn't as limiting as you'd think.
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Post by Squirminator2k » Thu Feb 01, 2007 9:45 pm

Terrain Three: CONSTRUCTION

I had a vague idea of what to expect from reducing the colour of this terrain, as it's one of the styles featured in the GameBoy Color version of Worms Armageddon. Again there's a lot of grey, brown and yellow in this one but remarkably I managed to get it down in the first attempt.

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Again there wasn't a pink, so I made a minor adjustment to a shade of grey.

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Post by Squirminator2k » Thu Feb 01, 2007 11:22 pm

Last one for today - I'm knackered!

Terrain Four: DESERT

This is the first terrain style that wasn't seen previously in Worms 2 and so has a slightly different artistic style which I had worried would be degraded upon conversion. I was pleasantly surprised.

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It looks rather good. Again I was hit with the "no pink" problem and tweaked a pale white to look slightly more pink. THis unfortunately had a slightly negative effect on the look of the bridge/girder, so I recoloured the girder green.

The mountains gave me no end of toruble. I had originally decided not to bother with them because they were so dark, but I caved and decided to go the whole hog. I almost with I hadn't, as the mountains took up more time than anything else. Still, it looks good overall.

Image Image
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Post by K^2 » Fri Feb 02, 2007 5:27 am

Wicked. Any way to release these as some sort of a pack?
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Post by Squirminator2k » Fri Feb 02, 2007 1:47 pm

I expect I'll be doing so once I've done a few more.
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Post by bonz » Fri Feb 02, 2007 3:00 pm

Squirminator2k wrote:I expect I'll be doing so once I've done a few more.
By a "few more" I hope you mean all the rest.
Including of course "tools" and the two unused ones from the WWP CD, "domestic" and "dinos".

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Post by AndrewTaylor » Fri Feb 02, 2007 4:39 pm

Well, then you can get to work on the W:OW ones.

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Post by Squirminator2k » Fri Feb 02, 2007 4:52 pm

bonz wrote:
Squirminator2k wrote:I expect I'll be doing so once I've done a few more.
By a "few more" I hope you mean all the rest.
I'll probably release them in packs of six - I've done five so far, so we're not far off from the first one.
bonz wrote: Including of course "tools" and the two unused ones from the WWP CD, "domestic" and "dinos".
I don't have any of the graphical elements from Domestic or Dinos, as they're not on the Page of Light. If you have them feel free to send them my way.

Right, now here's something for those of you who have been asking "HOW R U DOIGN THIS?!?!?!?!". I've taken screenshots of WormPrefs in action. You can click the next two images to show the full size, 800x600 screenies if you so desire:

Image Image

As you can see I'm currently working on DUNGEON, so screenshots to follow shortly...
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Post by K^2 » Fri Feb 02, 2007 5:12 pm

AndrewTaylor wrote:Well, then you can get to work on the W:OW ones.
You probably want animated 3D backgrounds too, don't you?
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Post by Squirminator2k » Fri Feb 02, 2007 5:33 pm

Terrain Five: DUNGEON

Dungeon didn't take me very long. I've managed to get my technique down so there's very little that can go wrong during this process now.

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For those of you playing the Home Version, I'm using the "Standard / Web Safe" mode within PSP7 for colour reduction. I find that most of the colours get washed out if you try to use Optimised Median Cut and you end up with a lot of murky colours. Bleugh.

Again, no pink. As there were two similar-looking dark browns I changed one for pink and then went around replacing all of the pink pixels with the remaining brown. Thankfully DeluxePaint has a very snazzy feature called "Stencil" which is tricky to explain but basically you choose which colours you want to "ignore" and then any changes you make to the image doesn't affect pixels of that colour. So setting a Stencil around everything but pink, then selecting the dark-brown and dragging a filled rectangle around everything meant that only the pink pixels were changed.

Anyway, here's how it looks.

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Post by Squirminator2k » Fri Feb 02, 2007 7:16 pm

Terrain Six: EASTER

Less talk, more rock!

Image Image

You'll notice, if you pay careful attention, that the full-colour version doesn't have any grass in it. I made it all the way to importing the terrain and loaded the game only to discover that no grass was being rendered. Why? Well, I'd forgotten to put any in. I very quickly went back into the 16-colour file and put the grass in - it would've been silly to go into the full colour one and add it there because I'd have to go through the palette-swapping junk again.

Also, rejoice - this landscape has pink in it!

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Incidentally, there are two terrain types that is in Worms Utd that was ommited from WormsDC for some reason - MONEY and CANDY. If anyone happens to have the relevant images I could recreate those while I'm at it.
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Post by diablo vt » Sat Feb 03, 2007 5:01 pm

These are great. Do you use Amiga Forever to emulate Worms DC because i'm thinking of ordering the package i've heard it's fantastic. :-) :-) .

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Post by KennyTornado » Sun Feb 04, 2007 2:51 am

I must say this is pretty impressive. Great job, S2K. :-)
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Post by ThreeHeadedMonkey » Sun Feb 04, 2007 9:07 pm

Long time no see.

Wow, this is awesome, S2K! I used to imagine what Worms 2 would look like had it been made using the Worms engine and this must be pretty close.

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Post by Squirminator2k » Sun Feb 04, 2007 11:48 pm

diablo vt wrote:These are great. Do you use Amiga Forever to emulate Worms DC because i'm thinking of ordering the package i've heard it's fantastic. :-) :-) .
Everything I have for emulating the Amiga with started off with a copy of Amiga Forever, and I've tweaked, added, adjusted and grown from the original version I had. I must buy a recent edition of the pack, though. It really is ace.
KennyTornado wrote:I must say this is pretty impressive. Great job, S2K. :)
Thanks!
ThreeHeadedMonkey wrote:Long time no see.

Wow, this is awesome, S2K! I used to imagine what Worms 2 would look like had it been made using the Worms engine and this must be pretty close.
Considering that WormsDC is the first time most of the "new" weapons seen in Worms 2 are implemented, yes - it's as close to "Worms 2-" as you'll get.

Now then, I've hit a stumbling block with regards to packaging these up. I can use LhA on the Amiga to unarchive but I've no idea have to package them up. I've found a couple of Windows-based LhA programs, but they're pants. The alternative is to zip them and bung them up here, or zip them and sned them to someone who can package LhA archives (I'm looking in your direction, K^2, command prompt stuff looks to be more your sort of thing).
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Post by K^2 » Mon Feb 05, 2007 12:29 am

I think I can make LhA archives. Send me the files, and I'll give it a shot.
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Post by Squirminator2k » Mon Feb 05, 2007 4:41 pm

I've emailed them to you.
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Post by K^2 » Mon Feb 05, 2007 5:02 pm

The program insists on 8.3 names. I'm not sure I know how to get around that.
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