Ok I've been toying with the sprites today. Made a gun hollow and my own faction logo.
But I tried looking for a sprite guide, like with little tricks and tips and do's and don'ts.
However search provided with just scavangeable information.. If I'm failing please remove this thread and point me to the right direction
If anybody knows a good place where I could start learning the finer arts of spriting I would be more then happy to know.

Also, I read weapon animations can only have 2 frames? But I'm pretty sure I saw mods with more then 2 frame animations?
And what about this colour thing. I've read somewhere that someone wanted more colours in the pallet of CC? Can't I just use my preferred editing software and use any colour I want?

Oh and btw, I'm a huge noob, just so you know


(oh and just realised, lua... thats not the same as making the ini's right? If not then ill probably need to go on a crash course lua )

First off, I would reccomend graphicsgale. It's a great graphics editing program, and lets you make palettes out of images. Then, find a post by rawtoast, and save his avatar. Those are all the colors you can use, or else it fudges up your colors. Also, I don't know about the animframes, someone else will have to explain that one.

Don't do something called pillow shading. A guide to shading.
There is something called SpriteAnimMode that lets you use as many sprites as you need, and I have not tested but I think you cannot use more than 2 frames on a gun where you do not change the SpriteAnimMode.

You can usually use whatever image editing software you want, but CC has certain colors in it's palette and if the colors you list are not in that palette they will change colors into something weird and freaky or just something that looks weird. Make sure it is always in palette by opening an existing sprite that has the palette (like any sprite that came with CC or any mod.) and working off of that.

Lua is another matter and is kind of hard to learn, I learned it from Grif but you can learn it from anyone you wish, just ask someone if they know Lua and if they will teach you.

Also, Benpasko, Rawtoast's avatar is an edited version of the palette, the colors are off.

Frames are limited to 50, actually.
Or at least they were in B18, and I doubt it has changed since then.
I tested, while making a door the old way.

Really? I use his avatar as my palette, and it works fine, maybe he edited it since I got it.

Well, it must be located somwhere in the Base.rte right? I could just use that palette

Its in base.rte, it's named palette.bmp.

AHHH! BEEN DOING THAT SHADIN FOR LIKE, FOREVER!!
THE HORROR!

Pillow shading is actually alright in CC for some objects that spin alot, like wheels and gibs, since it represents a light source that's from closer to the observer, but not up/down/left/right. When the object spins so much, there's no average angle, so you can't really account for anything but the depth axis.

But if something has an average/regular/common angle, you can orient the light source to generally apply correctly. CC style has a light source toward the observer and upward. Pretend the sun's at a 45 degree angle to the ground, and your back is facing it, as you look at an object. That's the kind of light source you're going for.

But with Lua, one could do dynamic shading, changing an object's sprite frame based on the object's angle, so it always has a good light source. But that's obviously not a tip for a self proclaimed 'newbie', since it's so meticulous that no one has done it yet.

That would be mainly useful for guns, which cannot be accessed by Lua.

For most sprites in CC you can have the light source come from the top-right and it'll look fine.
(Top-Left for legs, btw.)

That would be amazing. But hard to sprite.

Well not really: if you can sprite well then it's just respriting it with the light from a different direction. It's more that it's incredibly tedious to make enough frames to make it vaguely smooth.