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How do people make new icons?


subtledoctor

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What it says. It feels sort of ridiculous that the main thing holding me back from making new spells is that I can't give them an icon.

 

At the moment, I'm working on abilities that can spontaneously cast spells of each level - something like a tiered version of NRD. So at some point a while ago someone did me a favor and made a few icons based on an existing one - take the "magicky" moon-and-stars icon from Miscast Magic, recolor it a bit, and add some Roman numerals, like so:

post-6306-0-05566300-1513829776.png

post-6306-0-21366100-1513829789.png

 

Problem being, I only have 6 of them and now I need 9. Well, it doesn't seem very complicated, sure I could hack something together in some MS Paint-ish program.

 

But, I haven't the first idea how. I can't even figure out if I can export the .BAM file to some other format that I an edit.

 

So, what do other modders do for this sort of thing? What tools do they use? Is it hard? Etc.

 

Thx

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It's not that hard from a technical perspective. Usually artistic ability is the limiting factor. The only slightly tricky thing is that BAM files use a palette, like GIFs.

 

The basic process is: export frames from BAM to a more standard format (e.g. BMP, PNG, GIF), edit them in your favourite editor, then reassemble them back into a BAM.

 

You can use a tool like BAM Workshop or BAM Workshop II to do this. I believe the original BAM Workshop is generally more reliable.

 

Here are some detailed notes from a more knowledgeable authority:

 

 

 

**** A GUIDE TO THE TOOLS ****

a.k.a. the bug report :/

 

 

**** BAM Workshop 1 ****

 

_What to use it for:

* Basic editing

* Pasting from other applications

* Copying to other applications

* Checking for pixels with a mask

* Exporting frames or sequences

* Importing frames or sequences

 

_What not to use it for:

#Can't do

* Importing palettes

* Creating non-paletted images from scratch

* Setting the RGB of shadow and background colours

#Bugged

* Opening some compressed vanilla BAMs*

* Setting negative offsets

* Directly opening files

* Reduced paletting

 

*If there are two separate blocks of content in a frame on background, it will sometimes fail to display one of them. Once you save, it's gone forever. This is most noticeable with staff-based weapons such as quarterstaves or spears.

 

_Hints:

 

For opening bugged BAMs:

 

Open the file with both BAMWorkshop 2 and BAMWorkshop 1 as well as an image editing program (such as Photoshop).

 

In BAMWorkshop 2 press Ctrl A (select all) and Ctrl C (copy).

 

Create a new document in your image editing program of choice, and size it according to clipboard contents.

 

Paste the clipboard into the new document. It should be the complete frame as it appears in BAMWorkshop 2, with green background and black shadow.

 

Select pixels with 0,255,0 and fill them with 0,151,151.

Select pixels with 0,0,0 and fill them with 255,101,151.

 

Copy the whole thing into your clipboard and paste it into BAMWorkshop 1.

 

Note: Copying directly to BAMWorkshop 1 won't work. It will come out distorted or misplaced.

 

Repeat this for all frames with missing content. Once you have done so, Save the file with BAMWorkshop 1. It will now be properly readable with it, and will look no different in the game.

 

 

For creating non-paletted BAMs:

 

Create the desired palette in your image editing program and export it as a Microsoft PAL file.

 

Open a random BAM in BAMWorkshop 2 and import the PAL file as its palette. Save it.

 

Now open it with BAMWorkshop 1 and voila, you have an editable BAM with whichever palette you desire.

 

 

 

For setting offsets:

 

If you're editing BAMs, you'll know you can offset the image in any direction by giving it either positive or negative offset values. Many uses *require* negative offsets to work.

 

BAMWorkshop 2 is not able to set them at all. BAMWorkshop 1 has bugged input fields: It will only let you enter numbers, and the minus sign is not a number. Decimal points are okay though apparently ahaha :p

 

But you can set negative offsets in BAMWorkshop 1. Open an empty file in Notepad and type a '-' in there. Copy it to the clipboard. Now go to the field in BAMWorkshop 1 and open the context menu (CTRL V will not work, nor will CTRL C). Select 'Paste' and there you have it - a minus sign in the field. Enter your number and you're set. Once the sign is there, it won't be going anywhere and the program handles it just fine.

 

 

Directly opening files:

 

If you set BAMWorkshop 1 as the standard application for BAMs, they will open fine... but to your dismay you'll find the Frames tab is empty, and everything else greyed out. This does not happen if you start the program first or open another file, but this is not very comfortable.

 

You can fix the problem easily by opening the context menu inside the Sequence tab, or, if your file has more sequences, selecting another sequence. You can switch right back, and everything works as it should.

 

 

Reduced paletting:

 

If you have a paletted original animation, you'll see the palette often seems incomplete. Due to compression, if no colour values above a certain number are used, it will cut off the palette at that point. (For instance, if you don't have blue/red, green/red, or blue/green pixels, the palette will be blank starting from index 232).

 

As you can't import palettes in BAMWorkshop 1 there's no way to get it back, and if you paste content into it that *does* use those colours, it will usually be messed up.

 

Now, if you open the file with BAMWorkshop 2, there's two things that may happen:

 

a) it displays the whole palette properly.

b) it cuts off as well.

 

If it is b) import the full palette from a PAL file, save it again and open it in BAMWorkshop 1 again. If it's fixed, then great! If it isn't, open it in BAMWorkshop 2 again and it should now behave according to a).

 

Navigate to a frame with some empty space. Select a one pixel brush and select the last colour index (the very last colour of the palette) as your foreground colour. Paint a pixel on the background (where you can erase it later).

 

Now open in BAMWorkshop 1, and hey - the palette is there. Do your editing, and once you're done, remove the stray pixel. Nice.

 

 

 

 

 

**** BAM Workshop 2 ****

 

_What to use it for:

* Importing palettes and previewing

* Editing shadow and background colours

* Making palettes not compressable

 

_What not to use it for:

#Can't do

* Setting offsets

#Bugged

* Exporting frames or sequences

* Importing frames or sequences

* Converting between paletted and unpaletted more than once (yep)

* Resizing things

* Seriously editing content

* Opening and saving some compressed original files.

* Deleting or adding frames

 

_Hints:

 

Compressed file issue:

 

So hey, BAMWorkshop 1 has problems opening some original files, and it turns out BAMWorkshop 2 has problems as well! Isn't it lovely?

 

Fortunately they rarely occur on the same file. While BAMWorkshop 1 has missing parts of frames, BAMWorkshop 2 has misplaced vertical lines with a random pixel at the top left corner.

 

A reliable way to reproduce this is for example trying to open one of the original G12 avatar animation files. The rightmost column of pixels becomes the leftmost column, and the first pixel will be some random colour. Otherwise the data is intact though.

 

Once you save it with BAMWorkshop 2 it will open incorrectly with BAMWorkshop 1 as well (and the game!).

 

 

Previewing:

 

BAMWorkshop 2 is rather nice for previewing your animations with various test palettes. Once saved properly with BAMWorkshop 1, the animations will load correctly. Go to the editing mode and hit shift+K. This will open the palette editor.

 

Import your PAL test palette and have fun seeing things in action. I suggest using the proper preview (the red icon below the sequences) since the play mode is kind of weird. The zoom messes up sometimes.

 

Shadow/Background colours:

 

BAMWorkshop 1 always saves with its default colour values for these colours. While usually this is no problem as background is always transparent, and shadow is... shadowed, there are a few exceptions:

 

* Item graphics do not render their shadow colours. If Index 2 is used for shadow and set to 255,101,151 as BAMWorkshop 1 will always do if you save, it *will* render pink. Open the file with BAMWorkshop 2 and adjust it to 0,0,0.

 

* Ground icons have their outline in the 'shadow' colour. This will display its RGB value, which needs to be 0,255,255 instead of 255,101,151. If you don't adjust the value, the outline will appear pink instead of teal.

 

Misc:

 

Exporting/Importing produces reliable colour corruption and will degrade the quality of your animation so don't do it. Pasting into BAMWorkshop 2 is not a good idea either.

 

Deleting frames or sequences permanently (removing them from the file) has caused some corruption for me. It doesn't re-number the remaining frames properly. BAMWorkshop 1 does, so always use that for managing your animations.

 

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Near Infinity also has very cool BAM editing options nowadays. You can't paint the graphics in NI, but you can export existing BAMs to bmp and you can import bmps to make a new BAM out of them, resize BAMs and the likes. The editing of the picture can be done with GIMP, if you are searching for a free graphics editing tool.

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Yeah, what Mike1072 said. I'll export and then use Photoshop--the only hard part is the limitation of the palette, but as long as you're not trying to make a finally graded, rainbow-colored BAM you'll generally be fine. Drop 'em through BAM Workshop to do the frames, cycles, and palette and you're good to go.

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Near Infinity ...

you can export existing BAMs to bmp and you can import bmps

This part I haven't been able to figure out. When I try to export it only gives me options for "original" and "uncompressed" or something like that. When I use the BAM editor (which is great - I've become adept at recoloring vanilla BAMs), it only seems to want to export as .BAM.

 

Thanks for the link for BAM Workshop, I'll take a look.

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You have two options to export BAM frames to images with NI.

1. Regular BAM Viewer: Export -> All frames as graphics
2. In BAM Converter: Add "Image Output" filter in Post-processing tab and click button "Save output file..."

Both options allow you to export as PNG (with transparency) or BMP.

Edited by argent77
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