The Order of Matter Manipulators

Ehm... how high is your tolerance level on "Scrub-Ness"? I would love nothing more than to make more mods than anyone can count, but I scrub it up worse than a frigging mop. You'd have to consider the fact that I have absolutely no experience with modding, outside of installing them. I can more than make up for it in creativity and determination, however. If you were to allow me to "Apprentice" that is. Again, completely blank slate looking for a hopefully not-headache-inducing way to get started. I have a bit of history with helping around the threads, bit by bit, so behavior isn't a problem. I even made a Mod Ideas thread recently to help centralize things and make it easier for modders to get ideas and people to work together on concepts more, though that has no affect on my learning rate or anything. I'm rambling, woops.

 

0-0 *Salutes* Uh.. OKAY SIR![DOUBLEPOST=1450831916][/DOUBLEPOST]

Is not seeing anything on the pages normal? Or am I making an awful first impression by messing something up?

 

It didn't let me download either. Luckily, I'm NOT a scrub with webpages, and found a bypass for it. It was blocking me for some reason. #NotToday,GimmieMyEBook[DOUBLEPOST=1450832823][/DOUBLEPOST]

On further inspection, it was blocking my antivirus for some reason. Weird.

 

So, when are we going to sit down and work on Halo Ultra as a group? Where is this supposed github repository? I'd like to contribute some files.

 

Because he hasn't linked it here yet, here is @The | Suit 's github repository for Halo Ultra: https://github.com/xxswatelitexx/Halo-Ultra

Later on, I'll contribute my improvements to the species and humanoid files.

 

So, it's been three months. Does anyone at all want to work on updating Halo Ultra for Glad Giraffe?

 

I have little interest in Halo, so not really any enthusiasm on my end.

 

Can we at least work on an update for it on Nightly? Uodate the races, crafting stations, etc.?

 

We could address any mod-breaking UI changes as they come.

 

I've only recently heard of this order, but I'm not certain if I'd be able to fit in. I don't consider myself disciplined enough to uphold the responsibilities of the Order, since I'd much rather develop my own mods than help others learn (I believe in learning through practice, and studying what other people have made), or maintain other people's mods (though I might be willing to work on a spiritual successor to said mods if I like them enough). While I tend to release my mods within an open source format, I'd much rather prefer to encourage and inspire others to develop "spiritual successors" to whatever mods I develop, since I have my own creative direction, while others might have theirs. (Thus, with regards to all of the outdated mods that I have in my library, others have had my implicit permission to use whatever assets they contain to develop spiritual successors to my mods since I started modding, and now, they have my explicit permission as well. For example, I consider Tanz' Lighting Overhaul Mod to be a spiritual successor to my Shadow-Casting Lighting Mod.)

However, I'm especially interested in establishing modding standards, and have been working on some "metamods", which were designed to provide structural frameworks for other mods to build off of, so as to establish a standard that would improve upon cross-mod compatability (such as the "compatability-bridging mods" that I've included within the Legacy Dungeons, Dungeons Everywhere!, New Biome Music, and Kevin MacLeod Music Pack mods), as I work on whatever mods catch my eye at the time. Perhaps there could be some sort of initiative to develop a set of standardized frameworks for modders? As far as I'm aware, I'm among the few "metamodders" in the community.

As far as other skills that I possess, I'm pretty experienced with just about everything, except for LUA and editing dungeons via Tiled. I've very rarely delved into LUA scripting, and when I have, it's primarily for tweaking what was already present within existing LUA scripts.

 

Just got done reading the Ebook, thanks for that Suit! I have a specific question....

Is there a way to set up the frames file of an animated object to be able to make the object "flippable", as in it can be placed facing left or right, without having to reorder the pixel art or make a lua file? Specifically, I'm dabbling on making rocket objects for ship building, and the vanilla ones only face one way. The .png has 9 frames, but I'm only using the first 4 when idle. When flipped, it uses the last 4, for the frame numbers stayed the same. I want to be able to flip them, and even make them orient top and bottom too... But I have no coding experience. I'm a graphic artist by trade and degree.... but always struggled with the code stuffs.

I'm getting confused with what I want to do, and how to do it. I guess my end game goal is to make all the rockets wireable in order to "turn them on" and make the animations play along with a sound. I'm just hung up on the damned code crap. I'm an artist, not a code monkey...
Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

 

For starters, I suggest that you take a look at how most animated objects (especially doors, switches, and lights) work, like this plantdesklamp1.object file:

Code:

{
  "objectName" : "plantdesklamp",
  "colonyTags" : ["floran","floranprison","light"],
  "rarity" : "Common",
  "description" : "A desk lamp. One of the most useful items in any Floran prison.",
  "shortdescription" : "Plant Desk Lamp",
  "race" : "floran",

  "apexDescription" : "This desk lamp appears out of place",
  "avianDescription" : "I can't imagine what they use desk lamps for here.",
  "floranDescription" : "Desk lamp used to sssmash prisoners.",
  "glitchDescription" : "Puzzled. A desk lamp.",
  "humanDescription" : "This would look delightful on my desk.",
  "hylotlDescription" : "I would never place this monstrosity on my desk.",

  "category" : "light",
  "price" : 75,
  "lightColor" : [120, 179, 89],
  "pointLight" : true,
  "pointBeam" : 6,
  "beamAmbience" : 0.45,

  "inventoryIcon" : "plantdesklampicon.png",
  "orientations" : [
    {
      "imageLayers" : [ { "image" : "plantdesklamp1.png:<color>.<frame>", "fullbright" : true }, { "image" : "plantdesklamp2.png:<color>.<frame>" } ],
      "flipImages" : true,
      "imagePosition" : [-3, 0],
      "spaceScan" : 0.1,
      "anchors" : [ "bottom" ],
      "direction" : "left",
      "lightPosition" : [0, 1],
      "beamAngle" : 225
    },
    {
      "imageLayers" : [ { "image" : "plantdesklamp1.png:<color>.<frame>", "fullbright" : true }, { "image" : "plantdesklamp2.png:<color>.<frame>" } ],
      "imagePosition" : [-9, 0],
      "spaceScan" : 0.1,
      "anchors" : [ "bottom" ],
      "direction" : "right",
      "lightPosition" : [0, 1],
      "beamAngle" : 315
    }
  ]
}

In particular, notice under "orientations" a boolean variable called "flipImages"? Use that for if you want an animated object that reuses the same images whether it's facing left or right, with only one of the left/right orientations having "flipImages" set to "true".

 

Yeah I tried the flipimages code, and it worked fine... However the image order was not right.

The Rocket.png has 9 frames, but I only use the first 4, labeled 1,2,3,4. When the image flips, it now uses 9,8,7,6.

The more I think about it, the more I think I need to make an animation file, like the turret example.... Ugh.