Widescreen modding?

[Nash]

I'm not sure if it's too early to post this kind of thing but is there any way I could mod some of the sprites and artwork to be widescreen friendly? The Duke statusbar and Lo Wang's sword in particular are really bothering me. :P I'm thinking of looting some of the graphics from the modern remakes on Steam, plug them into Raze as graphics mods. Does the engine support this kind of thing already?

Note: I have ZERO experience working and modding with Build engine.

[Rachael]

For now, the modified assets I think have to be loaded into a tiles###.art file using the appropriate picnums. Yeah, that's kinda messy, but it is what it is.

That being said though, this port uses EDuke32 as a base. So any method that EDuke32 supports for modifying assets, this one should, too. With that in mind, you can give this a try.

[Graf Zahl]

Have a look at how the Blood status bar replacement is done, the same method should work for Duke as well.

[Graf Zahl]

I just found the SW widescreen assets from the Redux version in an archive of that abandoned ICED port - unfortunately with a license that doesn't help:

All the files contained in this folder are from "Shadow Warrior Classic Redux". This project has been granted a non commercial use license to use these assets by the original developer. Special thanks to them for letting this project use these assets!!

I'm not sure if it's ok to use them under these cicrcumstances.

[sinisterseed]

Well, it says non commercial use, wouldn't this be okay then?

Devolver/3DR also do read their e-mails, by the way. I'm thinking that maybe we could contact them personally and see whether they could allow us to borrow some of the assets to use in Raze, such as the status bar and the widescreen sword sprite?

[Rachael]

Well, it says non commercial use, wouldn't this be okay then?

No. Not for a GPL project. By definition GPL allows for commercial use so anything that prohibits commercial use would likely be a violation of the GPL to include. (We get around it in GZDoom by offering a separate game-resource archive that can be deleted for stand-alone games, but I am not sure if that is the right way or not... nobody's ever gotten on our ass about it though - it at least helps actual game creators be in the free and clear though)

Devolver/3DR also do read their e-mails, by the way. I'm thinking that maybe we could contact them personally and see whether they could allow us to borrow some of the assets to use in Raze, such as the status bar and the widescreen sword sprite?

That may be a possibility. Dunno if we'd want to go that far, but it's certainly something to consider.

[sinisterseed]

They could be in a separate .pk3 to avoid packing them into the main file if it could cause issues. I think. Either as part of Raze or as a separate addon, I'm ok with any approach.

But first we need to get in contact with them to see if we could reach an agreement.

[Graf Zahl]

Well, it says non commercial use, wouldn't this be okay then?

No. Not for a GPL project. By definition GPL allows for commercial use so anything that prohibits commercial use would likely be a violation of the GPL to include. (We get around it in GZDoom by offering a separate game-resource archive that can be deleted for stand-alone games, but I am not sure if that is the right way or not... nobody's ever gotten on our ass about it though - it at least helps actual game creators be in the free and clear though)

That only applies to code, not data. You are very much allowed to use a GPL engine with non-commercial data.
My problem here is not "non-commercial". The code is non-commercial anyway thanks to Build. My problem is that the license appears to be specific to ICED SW.

Devolver/3DR also do read their e-mails, by the way. I'm thinking that maybe we could contact them personally and see whether they could allow us to borrow some of the assets to use in Raze, such as the status bar and the widescreen sword sprite?

That may be a possibility. Dunno if we'd want to go that far, but it's certainly something to consider.

Stuff for later. Right now I'd rather not do such things.

[sinisterseed]

Okay, so a story for another time then.

[Nash]

What if I drew custom widescreen assets, for example if I extend the sword with my own artistic recreation - while still retaining the original art style? Would that help Raze?

[Graf Zahl]

Yes, that would help.

[sinisterseed]

That would be even better, if it's not too much trouble for you .

If you do get to this, may I suggest investigating the sprite of the Riot Gun? It also has some missing faces to the right, particularly its belt is too short. I was thinking of fixing this in a similar way to Redux which seemed to have hacked its offset and moved the weapon more to the right side of the screen in a way that the missing face can no longer be seen, but if you can extend some of its elements that's probably even better.

[Nash]

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[Graf Zahl]

You normally load a texture definition into the editor but essentially, yes, that's how textures work in Build games. It's a totally stupid and hard to use system but remember: Ken Silverman designed the engine to be friendly to the machine, not the mapper. But don't judge the system too harshly from Slade's interface - that is just making something bad magnitudes worse.

[Rachael]

Yeah I made a similar comment about that earlier about SLADE. Its .ART editing interface is really undeveloped and unusable. I suppose I'll someday have to create a utility that extracts the graphics en masse so they can be edited with external applications.