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hohoho i was messing around with the modding tools and made a pretty cool DA... But how would I go about giving him an attacking command button? Right now you have to wait till he's still in order for the attacking to commense



Oh yeah and what about switching out his spells? Like if i wanted to replace Feedback with Psi Storm or something?

Edit:

Also, anyway of changing that blue archon beam to something else or removing it all together?

To change buttons add to and spells you use stargraft. I think there was a tutorial somewere, but I'm not sure where.

i was messing around with stargraft and got it to work out how i wanted, ty super!



Lol I replaced the move button with attack, i mean who uses move when u can right click instead...

Lol... you could have just added a new button... but if that works for you I guess.

Lmao, nice!

I like it, you should make a good mod with that man!

Hmm I got another question.

Notice the blue archon beam? How would I be able to duplicate that, make a new grp out of it (recolor to red) and assign it to the Dark Archon? I know thats probably way too advanced but I'm a bit curious...

You can extract the grp from the mpq, use retroGRP to turn the grp file in bmps, then edit the bmps to make the attack red. Then recomplie to a grp and upload it into an mpq and go. This would change the normal archon attack to red, so form your question I think you already know this. So what you need to do to make it be a tottaly different attack sprite. First extract the regular archon attack, use retroGRP to decompile it, then edit it to make it red. Next you would then need to unpack another attack grp(an unused one) and instead of saving your edited archon attack as the original grp, you use retroGRP to save it as the unused one. You then load the grp into an mpq, and set the Dark Archon's attack sprite to the unused one. And whamo, that should work. You might need to change things in the Iscript too, but I'm not exactly sure what, so you'd have to look into that.

I think the archon "beam" is attached to the archon. They are part of the same grp. So you would have to be good with photoshop.

SuperToast and m.r.bob have the right ideas there. I think you have already found out that the Archon beam is a separate GRP file from the main Archon, but it is linked to the Archon through iscript. The basic jist of what you'd have to do is you'd need to re-add the beam to images.dat and the MPQ as a separate image, possibly changing images.tbl in the process. I don't think it's that hard, but I have been doing this a while, so I might be out of touch with how hard it really is.

For this, you need Arsenal Zero because Arsenal III corrupts arr\images.dat each time it edits it.

1. Find the ID of the Archon beam in images.dat. The easiest way to do this is to extract the Archon's iscript and look for the image overlay command in its attack animation which will be creating the beam. Memorise this ID number, or make a note of it somewhere. We will be copying all the details of this images.dat entry to your new images.dat entry.
2. Extract the archon beam GRP file (you can get it's filename from the iscript you just extracted) from the MPQ, edit it to be red and resave it to a GRP file using RetroGRP. Now add the edited red beam GRP file to the MPQ. Use whatever filename you like, as long as it starts with "unit\". For example, "unit\protoss\myredbeam.grp".
3. Extract a fresh copy of arr\images.tbl from the MPQ. Edit it with TblPad. In here are all the filenames of all the GRPs in StarCraft, without "unit\" at the start, as StarCraft assumes they all will start with "unit\". Add your filename right down the bottom, without the "unit\" part. For example, add "protoss\myredbeam.grp" to the bottom of images.tbl. Look in the title bar and memorise the ID number of your new images.tbl entry. We will need to give this to a new images.dat entry so that it points to your new GRP file.
4. Using Arsenal Zero, convert your images.dat file into an INI file, which I assume will be called images.txt. If you open it up you'll see a whole lot of entries


The nice thing about the headings is they all start with their ID numbers. So, jump to the ID number of the archon beam by searching for "(id number):". For example, if you found the Archon Beam's image ID to be 443, then search for "443:" and you'd jump straight to that entry. Copy everything about the Archon Beam.
5. Now, search for an unused images.dat entry, you can find those by searching for "unused". You'll jump straight to an entry like "[373:Protoss Scout (Unused)]" (it won't look like that though). Overwrite all the properties of this entry with the properties of the original Archon beam that you copied from step 4. You now have two blue Archon beam entries. Memorise the images.dat ID of this second entry that you're about to change.
6. All you need to do now is change your duplicate blue Archon beam into your red one. To do that, change the "File" property to the images.tbl ID of your new GRP file. You memorised this in step 3. Now I can't remember exactly whether TblPad counts images.tbl IDs starting from 0 or 1, if it counts starting from 1 you'd need to make this ID one less, because StarCraft counts from 0. Notice that the iscripts for the two beams are the same. That's the easiest way to do it, since the graphics will have the same frames anyway, it sounds appropriate.
7. Now, open the iscript for the Dark Archon using ICE or IceCC, find its attack animation, go to the line where it does its image overlay (imgol08 or whatever the command is for this situation) and change the images.dat ID it uses to the one you memorised in step 5.

Now, whenever your Dark Archon attacks, it will use your new images.dat ID, which will use your new images.tbl ID, which will use your new GRP file. Ta da! It's quite logical to me, I think you could definitely do it. Try it out.

Well I did it! After 2 hours of messing around with stuff I finally got it. That was a great tutorial BST.

Cept there's one tiny little problem... I think I screwed up in Retro GRP or somethin, take a look...



Also, I learned that in Images.dat... the File=# has to be +1 of what it is in the TBL file... I did some research and noticed like if malestrom was 928 in the TBL file, it would be 929 in Images.dat so I changed mine to 930 even tho in the TBL file it says 0/929.

ADDITION:
Ok, I think it has something to do with the palette im using. I can't load the ones that come with Retro GRP, says invalid palette type or whatever. But I got it to look a little better by making a JASC pal out of the palette created when I opened the original archon beam bmps.

Check it out!

Wow, good job Killer! I'm sure the tutorial I wrote would have be full of unintentional mistakes and contradictions, and so I'm glad you worked out how to do it in the end. That is actually what I would consider advanced modding, not really because it is hard (hard would be something like rocket science or nuclear physics), but because you're probably one of only a few modders who has ever done that. Until that post I made above, the only way to learn how to add GRP files to the MPQ would be to find out yourself, so only people who have been modding for far too long would know about that. I have never seen a tutorial on that part of modding before.

So congratulations, you should be proud. Heh, and it makes me feel it's kind of unfair I've spent so long finding out all of this for myself and now you guys get it for free. But oh well, it's not like I can get those years back, so I might as well do what's best now.


Yeah, that's the idea, get them from your BMP files. I've never got the PAL files to load, I think that those are only readable by RetroGRP. Palettes aren't actually stored in GRP files, and GRP files can be displayed with many different palettes, so that's why RetroGRP has to use its own palettes.

I think your beam looks all right in the second image. In that first image where the beam gets kind of green, that's probably happening because the closest match of the darkish red colour in the palette is that green colour. If StarCraft doesn't have the colour you want in its palette, then there's not much you can do, just play around with the hues and brightnesses to see whether you can get your program to find better closest matches.