Particle's Projects

[(Designer)Particle]

This is the first one, I think the rotations might not be exactly right yet, but still it looks so much better than the in game one in my humble opinion.

I'm going to do the cleaner bench next.

 

[HeatherL]

The bench is great, so much better looking. Thanks to both ZZ & Particle!!!

 

Particle-Would it be too much to ask that the new Fancy Restroom also have a version configured as a restaurant?

 

[(Designer)Particle]

20 minutes ago, HeatherL said:

Particle-Would it be too much to ask that the new Fancy Restroom also have a version configured as a restaurant?

Let me try an actual restaurant, in the new fancy style first, and if that isn't ok, then I'll make you a bathroom restaurant version.  Sound ok?

[(Designer)Particle]

Wow these are really nice.  It is amazing how perfectly they fit bench animations for guests, you can see them patting the armrests and everything, these are a perfect fit size wise.  So this seems like a fun time to explain how I'm doing these, because I can use ZZ's artwork to explain it.  But first, for everyone who is like shutupandshowusthebench! here is the pic:

 

 

I had to make a little test zoo to get guests to sit in my benches, so now they go walking all over this huge zoo with 2 exhibits.  The things I do for science!  Anyways. Here you can see the benches are amazing!  I did the secondary color on the seat and so there are 576 color options.  I really love this one, and I still think it is a "stone bench", even though there is hardly any texture!

 

So what I have to do to these images is to redo the colors so that the primary color is 16 colors, and the secondary is 8.  I experimented a little with trying to do 16 and 16 but I came up empty so far, so for now it is primary=16 and secondary=8.  Now the typical png file is 256 colors, of which one is usually transparent, so you end up with a palette of 255 colors.  Obviously, in most situations this means we are going to lose some colors when we compress some down to 16 and 8, which is no problem most of the time.  Also there is still plenty of room for other colors besides these prime and second colors, in fact you could do the math, it is 256 minus 25 (16+8+1 for transparency) so lots of colors are still left in the palette for "everything else".  But in the case of these benches there is nothing that we aren't going to swap.  Everything in the graphic is going to have to go from 255 colors to 16 colors.  So what I did with the first bench ZZ gave me was I compressed it down to 17 colors (16 for primary and 1 for transparent).  Then I set the configuration to only use the primary color on the panel (so no secondary colorswap).  So the question is how does that look after you do that?  Here it is:

 

 

You can see it isn't very different, although it is technically not as smooth looking, with the naked eye you can hardly tell.  Sometimes shrinking something to 16 colors makes it look bad, other times it hardly even matters.  In this case, it isn't anything I couldn't live with.  So I loaded that up and set up the palette in ztstudio, and then put it in the game to see what happened.  Besides having to play with the rotations a little because they were slightly different size images than the default stone benches (only because of the ground graphics) everything looked really good.  So that is what you saw in the first image.

 

For the second bench, it was actually a little bit of the opposite problem.  The graphic that ZZ made was only about 6 or 7 colors.  So I needed to do something to make it into at least 16.  What I did was I added some very subtle gradients to a couple of the surfaces.  Then I shrunk it down to 16 colors.  Also I made the seat a different layer, with a gradient of 8 colors.  The thing about the secondary color you have to keep in mind is, although 16 colors usually works to some extent, 8 color graphics have much less contrast.  Some things look terrible in 8 colors.  So you have to be very careful about what you choose for the secondary color.  Usually Bluefang stuck to some little stripe, or flavor item for this color, because doing entire walls with 8 colors can be difficult.  But I'm sort of crazy.  I'm trying everything right now, so I kind of want to find the limits of how far you can take the whole thing.  Still, if you're wondering, there is a reason Bluefang stuck to little tiny things for the secondary color.  And that is: just 8 colors allowed.  (They should have just made the secondary color 16 also but now I'm starting into rant mode so I'll just stick to the subject).  Here is what it looked like after I was finished playing with it, this is an extreme closeup so you can hopefully see the gradients:

 

And so then I loaded that up in ztstudio and arranged the palettes.  How the game figures out what pixels to replace is that you tell it where you want the swapping palettes to start in the palette.  It doesn't even matter what colors you use for these 2 colors that will be swapped, I used green here just to provide a good contrast to the grey.  In the end those colors will all be replaced by palettes anyways, so what I have found is all that matters is I choose 2 colors that don't really exist anywhere else in the image.  This is important.  Some images that already have a lot of colors might degrade a lot if you have to find 2 unique colors to remove from the image to set this up.  But I've been able to do almost everything I wanted so far, so we'll see how it goes when I have to tackle some larger graphics.  For now, all this just doesn't matter too much at all when you're talking about benches, or flowerbeds, for example.

 

So in the config I tell the game to start the primary color after all the other colors in the image.  Another way to put this is the last 24 colors in the palette are the only ones that will get swapped.  If a graphic only has 24 colors (plus transparency) then all 24 colors will get swapped.  This is why you have to arrange the palette in ztstudio, which is really easy the way JBL set it up, you just right click on the color in the palette to move it up, down, or to the end.  One little side note to remember here is all 4 views of the bench all need to have the same size palettes, or this won't work.  So if one image is 144 colors all of the views (in this case 4) need to also be 144 colors.  They don't need to be the same 144 colors, but no more or less than 144 will work.

 

Other than that, the only other thing I really did was to make the back views of the bench 1 pixel taller to fit the graphic of the ingame benches a little better.  ZZs version seemed slightly thin to me so I fixed it by 1 pixel.

 

So that is the basics of it.  There is a lot of subtleties to it, but to summarize, I take the 256 color graphic, separate out 2 colors from the whole thing, shrink those colors down to 16 and 8 color palettes, arrange those colors at the bottom of the palette, and then configure the item to be a building that opens a panel that has colors to swap.

 

So what do you guys think of the benches?  I'm going to make some really nice Icons for these, and then test them out a bunch, and then let you guys try them out so you can test them for yourselves.  Stay tuned for that!  And once again I really appreciate ZZ doing these graphics... I was struggling to figure out exactly how to pull off a stone bench but she nailed it twice!

[(Admin)Savannahjan]

Phenomenal work!   I love it when our designers collaborate on projects.  The benches are so much better, clearer, more defined.  And I love the super fancy restrooms, so colorful and with great detail.  

 

Bravo!

[(Designer)Particle]

Hmmm... which one do you think looks more like a "stone bench"?

All of these examples are using the "steel" palette for the bench color.  The group on the left are bench 1, the group on the right are bench 2.

 

Now remember, you can only use one stone bench "hack" at a time.  Or another way to put it is you can only use one download that modifies the sbench.ai file at a time.  The picture above is not really all of those benches together.  I saved the zoo, and then loaded it up with the other stone bench ztd to get these screenshots.  So try them both out if you want, but just not BOTH at the same time.  I can't decide which one to use this is really tough.  [they should go in your dlupdate folder, like usual].  If you try to use both at once, it won't cause a crash or anything, but only one will work.

 

colorswap_ZZstonebenches.zip

 

Enjoy, but remember these are hot off the grill so please report any issues!

[(Designer)Z.Z.]

Oh those look marvelous!

I like the actual stone one the best myself.

I love the gradients you put on the plain bench, gives them much more depth.

I use the little paint program that came with my computer to do most things, and it doesnt have a gradient maker.

I really miss Aldus Super Paint.....

Ive tried to find programs like Super Paint, but none of the ones that claim to be a Super Paint clone actually work like Super Paint.
I have Corel Paintshop, and it has a gradient function that is so completely confusing I have never been able to figure out how to use it, so I use Corel for color changing, and brightness alteration, and thats about it.

By the way, considering that you did the configurations on these, I would like it if they were named PZ_Colorswap_Stone_Benches.ZTD.

That way you get credit too :)

[(Admin)Cricket]

From the pic, I like the stone bench set on the right-hand side.  I'll put them in-game then see if I still feel that way :D

[(Designer)VeganCannibalism]

Those benches are spectacular! I think the one that looks the most like a "stone" bench is bench 1, particularly the light grey one on the top row. :D

[(Designer)Z.Z.]

Wow, the stone bench looks fantastic in game!