UPDATED: Nightcon - How Defcon Should Look

[N0ught]

-- UPDATE --

Well I was bored during server maintenance on World of Warcraft this morning, and I got to looking at my Defcon mods - two of the three I had produced (Dune: The Battle For Arrakis, and Worldcon; my slight mod of asurin's Satcon mod) are already available at the Defcon Modlist, and I hope many of you have enjoyed them. However, Nightcon was never uploaded to the Modlist, my links are dead now, and I couldnt find any of my hardcopies...

So I remade the mod. It has a new style, and a new, better and bigger satellite image of this lovely sleeping planet whom you are about to nuke to infinity. Enjoy!

Download at this link, and enjoy! File hosted by trickser - thanks for the help dude! (11.1MB)
http://home.arcor.de/another_trickser/d ... n_v1.1.zip


Screenshots:

Defcon 4; nothing has happened yet:


Defcon 3; zoomed in on skirmishes:


Start of Defcon 1; bombs away:


Well into Defcon 1; europe loses least:

[BrianBlessed]

I'm not one to split hairs, but isn't having the whole globe in darkness technically impossible? Unless everyone decided to turn their lights on during a solar eclipse, but even then it wouldn't be the whole globe..

[N0ught]

Of course it's technically impossible - but so is a map where it is day across the entire globe, like most of the available maps, including my other mod, Worldcon.

I don't think anyone would want to play Defcon with a band of day and a band of night in the same map - unless the program was dynamic enough to move the daylight in realtime, which it isn't. With the 360 degree map as it is, it would be like having two different colors of wallpaper in the same room.

I like to use Worldcon during the day and Nightcon during the night - it gives a bit of a linear feel to the game.

[PsychicKid]

Do the lights go out as you nuke cities? That'd be pretty cool.

[N0ught]

I found myself wishing the lights would go out when bombs hit them myself, but until IV does something a little more dynamic with the map, this will have to do.

[xander]

I found myself wishing the lights would go out when bombs hit them myself, but until IV does something a little more dynamic with the map, this will have to do. :)

It is too bad that black translates to transparent in the explosion bmp. Otherwise, you could create a black circle that would blot out nearby lights... :\

xander

[PsychicKid]

I found myself wishing the lights would go out when bombs hit them myself, but until IV does something a little more dynamic with the map, this will have to do.

It is too bad that black translates to transparent in the explosion bmp. Otherwise, you could create a black circle that would blot out nearby lights... :\

xander

I don't know much about coloring effects but couldn't you just set it so it's one bit of Red, Green, and/or Blue off of black? It wouldn't technically be black then, but still pretty close, right? Surely there's a way around it.

[PsychicKid]

Disregard this post. The problem was because I was using 1.2 beta.

[BrianBlessed]

Couldn't you just set the secondary colour for the blur map (World Land I think) as black, so then as the game goes on and more people get killed the lights fade then black out entirely?

PsychicKid: It's probably because the mods don't include a default style, so whatever style you have setup is altering the colours on the mods. Well I can only assume so anyway.

[PsychicKid]

Not only that, but is there a way to change the radiation color from green to match the deep blueish-purple of the land? That way the radiation would sort of blot out over all of the lights as multiple nukes go off. It looks like the radiation and explosion effect share the same graphic, so I wouldn't know how to change radiation coloring without affect explosions.

[BrianBlessed]

Well if you made the explosion bmp blue, then the fallout would appear a cyan colour.

The use of coloured bmps is actually quite handy. For instance I wanted to make the move to and attack symbol look different, so I had some crosshairs but made the cross part of the crosshairs yellow. Then when Defcon adds the blue to the bmp, it makes the central part of the bmp blue but the horizontal and vertical lines white, Defcon then disregards the white lines in game. Whereas with the attack symbol it adds red and displays perfectly.

It does bring up the subject of having colour variations of units and buildings, but I haven't really bothered trying yet it's probably fairly easy.

[PsychicKid]

(Copy and pasted from my other topic)

I'm trying to edit the graphics in this mod somehow so that way when a nuke goes off or people die, the lights go off. I decided to settle on a temporary lights going off by making a dark colored nuclear explosion. The problem is, the color is not dark at all when the bomb goes off and the explosion is transparent. I don't want this. I want the explosion color to look similar to the ground color in Nightcon and not to be transparent, so when the bomb goes off, it looks like the lights went out.

[xander]

Well if you made the explosion bmp blue, then the fallout would appear a cyan colour.

The use of coloured bmps is actually quite handy. For instance I wanted to make the move to and attack symbol look different, so I had some crosshairs but made the cross part of the crosshairs yellow. Then when Defcon adds the blue to the bmp, it makes the central part of the bmp blue but the horizontal and vertical lines white, Defcon then disregards the white lines in game. Whereas with the attack symbol it adds red and displays perfectly.

It does bring up the subject of having colour variations of units and buildings, but I haven't really bothered trying yet it's probably fairly easy.

This only sort of works. I was playing around with this a while back, specifically with regards to units -- someone suggested that different colors should have different units so that, for instance, the USSR could use MIGs, while the US used F-somethingoranothers. In theory, a blue spot on a sprite will not appear when you subtract out the green and blue to make red. However, in reality, the subtraction is not 100%, and the blue will still be present, though very dim. Thus, you can, after a fashion, make it work, but it is not perfect, and looks a bit odd.

xander

[hellcatv]

here's an idea how one could accomplish this on ATI hardware
step 0) invert the colors on the map and the units... (red goes to cyan, etc)
step 1) make the explosion white....(actually it's already white)
step 2) run the ATI control center and turn on the OpenGL special effect of "Invert"... that takes the defcon framebuffer output and inverts it before displaying it to the screen---not sure if they have that on the recent drivers, but it was there the early 6.x series catalysts---anyhow then the additive explosion effect would be inverted at the end and would be subtractive

-Daniel (from xmas and screensaver and polar mods)

[PsychicKid]

This mod rocks, but I will give anyone a cookie and a hug if they can make it so lights in and near a nuke blast go off (and stay off).

I don't mean to sound demanding, but I seriously think it would rock if it did that, even though I can't think of anyway for it to work and have the lights stay off.