Nomnisang

Hi, woah! Sorry for the delay. The short story is I was in process to get promoted at my job, so I worked my butt off and got it. Since then, my work load has increased, so I haven't made time for side projects. What does this mean for the project: In the last several months, I've spent most of my photoshop time screwing around. I have kept the project in the back of my mind, and plan to continue. While my professional life will continue to be busy through the holidays, my off-time will be getting more consistent. For anyone who is curious, here's a list of the current icon set that I plan to produce. Everything highlighted in green has a completed design. If anyone has an opinion on icons that should be added or removed from this list, please let me know. These are all icons that end up on the main gameplay screen, and include powers that I expect players to use the most. I'd like to start making more dramatic updates in the future, meaning I don't plan to post each icon as I complete it. Expect posts in the future to include multiple skill trees or mile stones.

Great work!

There's just under 90, so it's fewer than the feats. Those also include power trees, and a bunch of them are assets with an arrow added. That said, I should probably sit down and figure out how many of these I have left to produce. I've just finished designing Wound, but I feel like I need to rework the colors. Ultimately, I'm happy with the design. I think the silhouette I've designed is perfect for what I need.

Conditioning. I'm going to use what I've learned making this icon to improve the heal icon in the future. This silhouette will also be used for other similar icons as this project moves forward. As for the future of this project: I think that it's time that I start zeroing in on releasing some of these to the community. The plan from here on is to work on the icons that appear on the combat screen, rather than the menus. That means the attack icons, blaster icons and sword/saber attack icons. That also includes Attack force powers like push, wave, destroy droid and the like, as well as buff powers. I'm sure that I'm forgetting some essential icons, but I'd like prepare to release what I'm calling Suite One. If anyone can think of a category that needs to be released with the first Suite, let me know, and I'll work to include it.

Agreed. But I did learn a few things from messing with that.

I've run into a snag with the portrait transparencies. While messing around, I found that there is a layer behind it. I'm diggin' through KotOR tool to see if I can find the actual layer and mask it, but so far, the last two Sage green files that I've masked haven't been the file. I'm sincerely hoping that this isn't something with a sage green overlay over it. By the way, the mandalore image is a quick and dirty edit I made to help me find problems like these. I plan to either find much higher resolution images to sample from or to swap a green screen texture into a level and start snapping some of these.

Already figured out how to take care of it. The next status update will account for artifacts.

I actually love the idea of doing Mass Effect style character transparencies. What I could also do is have a fog transparency of red or blue depending on their light or dark side level. If anyone has some high resolution icons for the party members, I'd love to sample them. Failing that, if anybody knows of a good green screen texture pack, I could drop that into Telos or something and start getting high res shots myself. One thing to note on the Character Portrait Layouts: I cheated to get the level up icon in the corner. I didn't change the code or anything. I simply took my icon and moved it to the corner of my image, rather than centered. So you have a 256x icon in the top left corner of a 1024x image that's masked off. I have no idea how I would move character portraits to the center, or move the health bar, etc. I don't have any coding experience. My experience is limited to editing values in plugins and managing permissions for a Minecraft server back in 2011. If someone can point me towards a Gui tutorial, I might be able to get started... i should also look into the layout for the buff and negative status arrows, and see about moving those to the side, or to a lower corner. As for glossy: I'm fully capable of doing something like that, but glossy tends to scream early iPhone to me. I'd much rather keep the UI matte with light gradients. Still, I'd like to start taking on the menu tab icons, as well as the equip screen icons. I might start experimenting in the not too distant future. With regard to the menu icons: Has anyone else ever been bothered by the options and settings tab having a hammer as it's icon? In most games, it's usually a wrench or a gear, but those are used for skills and feats. If you were to make KOTOR today, what kind of icon would you make it? What it'd really like to do are some more physical health and force points bars. I'm love to design them to look like tubes with water flowing through them, with bubbles floating to the top. Unfortunately, I'm really not sure how the life bars work, currently. The assets I've looked at thus far have just been lightly covered edge caps for the character portraits.

That was a quick and dirty edit of the original resolution. I have the original docs saved. Those white pixels are artifacts from editing the 128x128 targa files. Doing the same exact mask at ahigher resoltion and scaling it down to an appropriate size eliminates those artifacts. If you check out my level up icons, those have gradient masks and com out much more interesting. Honestly, though, if I did want to edit the teargas, I would just need to drop in a black background before masking. What's cool about this project is all the little workflow problems I'm learning to solve. I'm actually more excited about what I'm learning than about replicating the icons. At this point, I'm feeling comfortable working on the GUI.

This puts your character in first person, allowing you to better frame up your shot. If you do this in K2 as Visas or Kreia [or later the Exile], you'll see in grayscale with the color of a character's alignment overlaid.

Experimenting with GUI element's and .tga gradient masks. Also, experimenting with layout.

One thing I find about a lot of Sci Fi textures is that in the future, there is no concrete. I'm glad to see these arch's have a stoney texture to them. Great work!

That looks awesome!

I'll keep experimenting and see what works. Finally started messing around with alpha masks in .tga's. I've never needed to use this kind of format before. I tried dropping PNGs into the override folder, and of course the game didn't use them. So I did a quick mockup. At this point, I'm really glad I keep my original documents, because if I had to remove those individual pixels by hand I'd give up now. Truly, though, I'm happy with the results. These critical strike icons are at 256x256. I still think that 128 scales better, but that's just me. Also; to whoever it was at Bioware who decided that icons should use Targa's: Why?!?

I think I've made more than a reasonable number of additions to that last post. This will make it a triple post. Weapon Focus: Lightsaber

@Parametric: These are pretty darn cool models. Have you thought about using these to replace some of the Alien Heads, or are you solely focusing on them as Player heads?

I'll need to look into this. As for how to select this stuff, it would probably be easier to selected the areas that I want to be transparent, then invert the selection [shift+Cmd+i]. Edit: Crap. I meant to add the quote to my last post; I had no intention of double-posting. Edit2: I might as well put this post to use. Here's the Critical Strike Feat Chain. Here's the new Attack icon And here's Power Attack. Edit 3: Did a little more testing. 256 looks better than 512, but I still think that 128 holds up better overall. The difference thus far is close to negligible, but I feel that 128 ends up being better optimized.

Actually, I can open a .tga [short for Targa] in photoshop without any issues. I've been working on these for a bit and saving them as PSDs. It's only now that I have access to KotOR tools that I'm experimenting with Targa's. My issue is that so far, when I save a Targa, it saves the icon with a white background. It could be as simple as fishing for some box that needs to be left unchecked while saving, but I haven't figured it out quite yet. Well, I start with the original sprite. I refer to it continuously throughout the process for color accuracy, proportions, and overall fidelity. Next, I open in in photoshop, and magnify it to a size where I feel comfortable. Throughout the process, I'll use the dropper to sample colors from the sprite. This really helps with the icons fidelity. Next, I create the assets. For something simple like the arrow, I'll create the shapes, and edit them with the transform tool until I have something I like. After that, I'll select each of the layers I'm using to build the new assets, and go under layer>Objects>Convert to Smart Object. Once I'm at this point, I'll go under Layer Styles and start messing with Color Overlays, Gradient Overlays, and Strokes. Even Strokes can use gradients. The great thing about this is that if I'm unhappy with an asset, I can still edit the Smart Object. I can go back in and mess with it until I'm happy. If I have multiples of this particular smart object in the image, they'll automatically update after I'm done editing the smart object. For something more complex like the Blaster, I might have to break out the pen tool, or reference an item icon. I tend to avoid the pen tool if at all possible. Does that make sense?

Yeah, that's something I've been trying to figure out. I've never worked with a Targa before. I was hoping that they would be like PNGs, and that I could save them as interlaced, but that didn't seem to work. Tomorrow is my off day, so I plan to spend some time making more icons. Hopefully I can figure it out by then.

While that might be something I'm interested in doing down the line, I've yet to scratch the surface of all the icons for the game's original feats and force powers. This is a topic that I'd be willing to come back to further down the line. Edit: Tested the Flurry icons in KotOR I. Unfortunately, the game is very low resolution without widescreen fix, and I don't have a widescreen fix available to me at this time [the woes of trying to be a Mac gamer]. If anyone else is interested in testing the icons, let me know. So far, I've discovered that imgur won't host Targa format, and after trying to attach them to this post, I've been chastised by the forum gods.

Big thank you to Rece. Thanks to his video tutorial, I was able to get KotOR Tools working on my mac. I tried the attack icon in the game. This is a test icon, and not the final image. I tried it at 128x128, and it looks fairly good at 2560x1600. Unfortunately, my game takes a hit to FPS at my max resolution, so I've included a third image for what the icon looks like at 1600x1050, and the image suffers a bit. For those of you wondering about 512x512; I didn't see a noticeable difference in quality in game. I'm going to keep experimenting for the time being, and try getting a few more icons into the game. Edit: Further Testing After further testing, I'm pretty sure that 512x512 looks jaggier in-game than 128x128. I might have to eliminate 512 as a size for now. I'll test 256x and 64x and see how the game handles it at a later time. If, however, someone finds a way to up the size that icons are rendered in-game, 512x might be viable. The current size of the icons when the game is running at a widescreen HD resolution leaves a lot of unnecessary negative space, and I would love to find a way to bump up up the icon size. I'll also note that while the image files for feats are TPCs in game, I'm currently saving my icons as Targas, as TPC doesn't seem to be a format that Photoshop supports.

Actually, the way that I'm doing things now, I expect that it would be easier for me to make a Hue/saturation adjustment layer and save both icons, rather than automate a batch. Doing it this way means that if I want a a gray-value gradient, I can place it above the layer. If I just do an automate action, it would take those gray values and make them sage green or blue. Aside from this, the only problem I see with doing this for K1 is the UI scaling it does. The menu screens are locked to a tiny resolution. It would definitely be worth doing the icons that make it to the combat queue.

I don't remember them being switched back in the Xbox version, but I don't feel like digging the heavy thing out of storage to find out.

Thanks, Rece. I'm actually watching your video tutorial for installing KotOR Tools on wine for mac. I plan to try it out tomorrow night after work.

I will make an effort to check the game later down the line. Hopefully, I will address that in the project closer to release. Unless, of course, Aspyr addresses it first. I will give Aspyr credit: Several years ago, I had them pegged as making mac ports on the cheap, but their port of KotOR II has been quite impressive. I don't know if that's due to their diligence, or if it's due to the late Team Gizka and the TSLRCM teams efforts.