City of Heroes: Live Forum Archive

Power Colors

AlienOne

By AlienOne,
Posted on: 2009-08-26 18:46 in Multi-Media Fan Creations

 

Posted

Here's a VERY rushed demo of the new power colors, as demonstrated by my rad/energy blaster against a bunch of grey Vhaz. This was made from a demo as I can't get into the actual test server right now. (A pity, I've made characters with much better colors than this.)

http://www.wegame.com/watch/Purple_Power/

Something for you demo folks, the colors are made with the FXTINT command which lets you set the RGB colors. While players can only pick a pair of colors, in a demo you can change those colors as much as you want, even while the power is 'playing'! I haven't had time to fiddle with it yet, but it should make for some good fun.

 

Posted

BaB posted a message in closed beta from "one of our developers" (I call him OoOD) that gives the low-down:

Quote:
Warning: This information is only useful to demo makers who are comfortable hand editing their .cohdemo files. That’s not something we explicitly support but I wanted to give a heads-up to the filmmakers out there.

In order to make color tinting work in demos we added a new command, FXTINT. This command sets the primary and secondary colors for the most recent FX. If you’ve seen FXSCALE and FXDEBRIS in your demo files this is analogous to them. FXTINT takes two parameters, both decimal numbers, which are the primary and secondary tint values for the FX.

For example, from my little test demo:
0 46 FX Maintained 29 CUSTOMIZEABLEPOWERS/FIRECONTROL/SMOKEHIT.FX 0
0 46 FXSCALE 10.000000 10
0 46 FXTINT -8388608 -8388480

This sets the just-fired ‘smokehit’ FX colors to 128,0,0 (medium red) for the primary and 128,0,128 (medium magenta) for the secondary. The way those numbers get encoded is like this:

Demo file number =
Red * 65536 +
Green * 256 +
Blue

Sorry it’s not more friendly but the usual reader/writer of those numbers is the code rather than human beings.

Note that the FX itself is what determines the blend mode so you have to change to a different FX if you want a different look.

The FXTINT command updates whatever effect was most recently created by an FX command, so you can add more than one FXTINT line with different timestamps and make the FX change color – at least until another FX is created. Bring on the rainbows, fade-ins and flares!
And no, I have no idea what FXDEBRIS is.

Ah, and my new power colors video just got done uploading! This one is a direct recording of live play, so I trade off odd moving corpses for a lot of GUI in the way, but it will do.

Power Colors Demonstration

 

Posted

FXDEBRIS
Most likely the floating pebbles that remain after Hurl Boulder and similar leftover particles.

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Posted

Excellent! Thanks for putting it out there. I've added it to the Chronicles as a demonstration of what i16 will (hopefully) show.

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Posted

Can't.. view.. Wegame.. blocked...

/em Beaker

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Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by AlienOne View Post
Could someone explain Babs explanation on how that multiplier works for the colors to get that coded number please?

"The One"
I could be wrong, but it looks like he's just emphasizing the six-digit hex format for the colors.

(I misunderstood the question initially when I wrote out the following, but I'm leaving it in for clarity's sake. )

I haven't sat down to work it out, but if you look at it in hexadecimal format, it makes more sense. Basically - and I'm sure I'm getting the format wrong but it should get the point across - the colors are represented in a six digit hexadecimal number, between 000000 and FFFFFF.

The first two digits represent red, the second two digits represent green, and the last two represent blue.

So full on red looks like this - FF0000, green is 00FF00, and blue is 0000FF. Black is 000000 and white is FFFFFF.

Does that make sense?

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Oku No Te - lvl 50 MA/SR Scrapper
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Nyghtfyre - lvl 50 DM/SR Scrapper
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Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Coolio View Post
FXDEBRIS
Most likely the floating pebbles that remain after Hurl Boulder and similar leftover particles.
You would think - but that's all handled client side, I'm pretty sure. That stuff doesn't clear out when a demo loops, either. I searched through gigabytes worth of demo files and never found a single instance of it.

----

On the colors thing, it's like he said. Colors are decribed as a red value (0 to 255), green (0 to 255) and blue (0 to 255). Put the numbers through the formula he gave and you have the number in the demo. (Except you have to make it negative for reasons unknown.)

Kinda odd they are doing that. Colors elsewhere, like in costumes, are hexadecimal. Oh well, easy enough to deal with.

 

Posted

Updated the Demo Edit program so it can handle the new color tinting. It doesn't do anything fancy with them yet but it no longer throws out the commands.

Also, I found a bug that was causing all the FX commands to set themselves to a 0 time delay. Most of the FX commands I've seen are 0 anyway (or very small) so I never noticed the bug before.