I've got good looking pics, but I have no idea how to changed the coloring to JA2 style.

Where did you get the pic from?.... Don't say it's your mother or we're all going to hell.

Prolly it's a polish women.

I've actually been using MS paint......... sad but true. I resize the pics with MS word.

dave17

Does anyone have a functioning STI for this?

As far as I know, there are no STI versions and the JA2 archive just contains the bmp files for the first girl in 90x100 and another chick.
I don't know where to get the second girl.
I you want to use them for your own mercs, you have to create at least the 48x43 versions, otherwise they will be of very little use to you.
The ladybig.png file from the archive has the wrong dimensions, so it needs to be resized as well. On top of that, all images have way to many colours. Usually around 4000. Sti files use reduced colour palettes with a maximum of 256 colours. If you have done all this, you will notice that the chicks will stick out, because they are too pale. So you probably want to recolour them as well.
See for yourself:

I could do all of this, it is not too much of a hazzle, since the animations are already there. So, if no one has working sti files, just send me a PM and tell me who you want to replace.

If you're still doing this, I'd like to see the two middle ones as imps. (208 and 209 maybe?)

Man... someone call Samuel L. Jackson to do new sound acting for the black man, how awesome would that be?

Can get sound samples of them from nearly every film they have been in. Only thing that would be hard is getting them describing Crepitus, but I guess you could just use some funny quotes instead

What my question is, in regard to the mouth and eye animations in the Sti, Now I understand the concept that the Sti's use small chunks of the eye area and mouth area of the characters face which in turn has it's co-ordinates used in game to overlay these accordingly.

Now I was just wondering would there be any problem using a whole change of face art for the different expressions. For example can I have a unique facial expression for say eyebrows raised? Which would use the entire 48 x 43 pixels for that expression? Not a chopped down view that crops the image and uses co-oridinates?

From an artists perspective this gives me a few more options and details in the expression, but wanted to check if this is even plausible? Would there be much work involved to have a face arranged like this? That is if it's possible?

Appreciate any answers with this.

Where's that gun?

Only joking Kazuya, thanks for the instructions. Plan 1 didn't work, the palette was still coming out in a limited range as before, this was the first time I've used paste clipboard image, so gave that a go in Sti editor also, but still the same results.

That was the first time I'd used to paste clipboard button as I'd heard bad things about it, but appears to work so far. I did notice Sti did decide to spazz out some of my frames though, almost at random when loading in new images, for example I loaded frame 6, then when returning to frame 0 it was all buggered, so had to reload that one again, Nice! So as mentioned by another poster on here regular saving is a must!

Well that's one big hurdle jumped, just need to crop the mouths and eyes and we should be cooking.

Are you sure, that you pasted the correct image and not the damaged one from STI Edit in GRV? (Again, when you use GRV, delete all pages in the sti file, before you paste your face.) Because it works perfectly for me and this is the way, I create all my STI portrait files. The only thing you have to look out for, ist that you paste a picture with only 255 colours and the picture mustn't have any pixels in it with the RGB value (0,0,0) <- This value is often treated as the colour key value, so hands off of it.

I find it surprising the Sti editor saves BMP's to an RGB image rather than an indexed one, considering the file only contains a limited indexed image of 256 colours.

I have now moved on and have been working on a 106 sized face in Photoshop, using some Sir Tech portraits as a guide. What has surprised me is how poorly the Sti editor handles it's palettes. I've again tried using Sti editor and GRV but the imported image converted the palette poorly, actually using only 163 colours of the 256 palette. This means for my particular image it's lost subtle gradients in the flesh tones, something which has disappointed me as I put effort in to include them, especially for a female character such as this.

Some may say there's very little difference between them, but remember in the game's lower resolution these pixels and the colours they use will appear larger in game. I may be picky, but I'm sure many of you budding artists want the game to use the colours you have in your art, not some inferior variation.

I really like your new portrait. Good job! :ok:

What exactly did you do with GRV? I checked again, and I am 100% positiv, that GRV handles the portrait properly when the picture is reduced to 255 colours, before it is pasted into the sti file. I just used your colour reduced gif file with 256 colours (and noticed that there is black in it), and pasted it in GRV. A check in STI Edit verified that it uses the exact same colours as in your gif. They are just in a different order in the palette.

Personally, I would like to see all sti files converted to proper png. From a technical standpoint this would be the best solution, because we would have 24 bit colours + 8 bit alphachannel + losless compression. Animation parts for the faces could be stored as layers with lower dimensions, just like sti now and we would get rid of STI Edit. Some progress has been made regarding this, but we are far from getting rid of sti.

Is there any reason for the smaller 33 faces and 65 faces having the eyes and mouth frames included? They never appear to animate in game do they?

The game won't crash if my 33 and 65 faces are just single frames, will it?