Okay, as some of you know i'm making NSSprites which will be hosted on rr.org once i get lots of sprites in, i can't do them all myself, and to keep the site alive i'm going to need your help. so please if you can make something, hud, crosshair, weapon death sprite, or anything else email it to me @ necro@planethalflife.com and i'll be sure to include it with a nice little review

i might try something for you.
edit: I might do an alternative hivesight set that's maybe a bit easier to see than Fina's.

thanks licky, oh and i'd like to welcome fam to the NSS crew he'll be helping with sprites

What progs would I use formaking sprites cuz i have a few good ideas also maybe if you could provide a few tuts too id be glad to help!

you make it in an paint program (psp, ps NOT paint ) and the make it into a sprite file with sprwiz, i'll have a tutorial up when the site goes live.

im 80% done a stylish commander interface
its black
with some shiny highlights

after that ill make a catfood interface

i'd like to ask everyone who sends in sprites or releases sprites in general PLEASE put a pic, it makes my life a lot easier

How would i open existing sprites though

Wrench Software's Tools Section has got the best sprite viewer for HL. You can use this to view and extract images from sprite files.

Cant wait for those custom huds and xhairs!

Yeah. Hurry it up.

Hmm, I made this HUD, but its only really good for people running NS at 1024 x 768 resolution.

Thats all fine and dandy, but wheres the download?
(Man, that kicks mass **obscenity** ! )

very nice! try 2 get it released soon!

wow cool hud man!

Yes, it is very nice, i hope for a release soon.

Well here it is. As I said it is only good if you run at 1024 x 768 or larger (probably)

At 640 x 480 (which is all my Voodoo 3 is capable of) The sprite scales horribly, and it looks really bad. Therefore I don't know how this actuallt looks in-game at high resolutions, so any feedback is appreciated.

eeeeeeeeexcellent! now i can put this up as the first hud ever released!

mmm very nice and very nice in game to like it lots i dont no wat to get into moding sprites skins maps argh questions, questions, questions

carbon14 is a realy good skinner this looks realy nice at 1024x740

where is the crosshair file? I can't find it.

Sorry, no crosshairs yet, I'm working on it though.

i'll see what sprites i can work out- first thing i do will prolly be the motion detection ones. what i need is a sprite viewer that works in xp tho.

Well, I've got a new set of Hive-Sight sprites done.

Got tired of the badly looping cycles the default ones went through, the 'loop' looks forced on them both when viewed over long periods.

So, I pulled up POV-Ray and made some properly cyclic sprites. They're nothing particularly fancy, and I took steps to make sure they were approximately the same colours and styles as the default ones, only solving the one set-out problem of the looping sequence looking forced.

I'm also investigating a solution for the hive-sight being more opaque than was intended from what I can tell, particularly the white 'friendly' circles.

QUOTE (Kaine @ Nov 21 2002, 06:39 PM)

i'll see what sprites i can work out- first thing i do will prolly be the motion detection ones. what i need is a sprite viewer that works in xp tho.

The sprite viewer I listed works just fine in XP... So does the one by Mach III if you can find it.

wolf those rock, can i get an ingame screenshot?


oh and NSS should be online as soon as monse gets back from DC (this weekend!)

Comparison Shot of 'Parasite' sprite:

Comparison Shot of 'Scent of Fear' sprite:

Comparison Shot of 'Friendly Uninjured' sprite:

Comparison Shot of 'Friendly Under Attack' sprite:

Sorry about that spam, the boards have a limit of image-count per post, and I didn't feel like trying to merge images together willy-nilly to meet that limit. :-)

Also, I'm working on some less-arbitrary gunfire flashes, as right now they're all the same frame, just mirrored horizontally and vertically. Progressing a little at making similair-looking visual splash with POV-Ray, will see if I can make random versions with same like I did for these.

Heck, note that, while I kept some the same 'effect' I did different rendering loops and not just recolours. =^.^= Yeah, it's tiny, but I'm proud when something turns out nice-looking like these did, to me at least.

I may make an 'improved' version at some point, though this version is free for any use by anyone, it's up in the air! If anyone wants, I can explain how the POV-Ray effect works, if they want to attempt similair.

i would be very appreciative if you could make the difference in color of the first two somewhat more pronounced- i'm just a touch colorblind, and it makes hivesight somewhat irritating sometimes. thnx. oh, btw. i got the sprite viewer to work, i just downloaded it again. just one of those things, i spose. will get to work on motion tracker sprites tonite.

I love these hivesight sprites - I quite liked the old ones, but the watery effect these have looks great in-game. They're possibly a little too bright, but still better than the defaults. Nice work.

As far as muzzle flashes go, if any of you have DoD I can recommend using muzzleflash1.spr from that, as it looks excellent in-game. (and much easier to just use that than to make a new sprite)

QUOTE (Kaine @ Nov 23 2002, 05:38 AM)

i would be very appreciative if you could make the difference in color of the first two somewhat more pronounced- i'm just a touch colorblind, and it makes hivesight somewhat irritating sometimes. thnx. oh, btw. i got the sprite viewer to work, i just downloaded it again. just one of those things, i spose. will get to work on motion tracker sprites tonite.

The goal with this 'version' of my hivesight sprites, was to match the original sprites as closely as I could without going to insanely extreme lengths. :-) Personally, I intend to make new hive-sight sprites that break from the mold entirely with easier-to-see colours, and different shapes between all four.

My initial plan is the duller orange for 'basic hivesight' with the existing effect.

For Scent of Fear, I'll probably make it the same colour pretty much. :-) A different shape though, not a perfect circle but more a wavey set of lines, like heat lines from a comic book over a desert.

For 'friendly' I might well reverse the current system, from a 'circular band' to a 'circular blob' that properly is semi-transparent.

For 'friendly under attack' I think I'll just add a rainbow-coloured band around the 'circular blob' effect, nothing fancy, just a little rainbow colouration around the edges.

QUOTE (Souris @ Nov 23 2002, 06:44 AM)

I love these hivesight sprites - I quite liked the old ones, but the watery effect these have looks great in-game. They're possibly a little too bright, but still better than the defaults. Nice work.

Yes, this is due to a glitch in the Half-Life engine. For instance, the 'friendly' circle, the grey and red ones, are meant to be half-transparent at all times. Half-Life 'helpfully' auto-normalizes the brightness on sprites before showing them, so the 'medium gray' becomes an 'opaque bright white' instead. My next release of sprites will address this hopefully. :-)

QUOTE (WolfWings @ Nov 23 2002, 12:41 PM)

I can explain how the POV-Ray effect works, if they want to attempt similair.

I wouldn't mind knowing, I love arsing around with little graphicsy things. All the better if I can make something useful while I'm doing it

Well... I'm a perfectionist, even when it makes my life harder.

In this case, I used an isosurface in POVRay, which is where you give it a formula, and it calculates the true geometry for the surface. I.E. It's commonly used to generate 'true' bump-mapping that actually deforms the surface it's used on.

It's SLOW to render.

I'm using it to render a perfectly flat cube, four units wide and broad, and two units 'deep' into the camera.

The front AND back surfaces have about 1/1024th of a unit of deformation. So little it's not even visible if the isosurface is rendered without its glass attribute.

Anyways, the isosurface is 'perfectly clear' with an IOR (Index of Refraction) value of 1.5, so it severely deforms light passing through it since it has two 'bumpy' surfaces.

For the 'existing' sprites, I actually had a torus behind it, one light source close, the other far away, so one lit up the inner edge of the torus and one the main edge of the torus, letting me get that two-tone effect easilly.

On the 'friendly' sprites, I just replaced it with one light source, and made the torus noticably thinner. :-)

Anyways, hope that helps explain it a little?

Aye, ta. Always nice to know little tricks like that.

Here's a new version of the sprites, based on the ideas I had to 'improve' the existing hivesight. I'm rather proud of how I pulled off the 'rainbow' effect for 'friendly in trouble' without making it very distracting. :-)


They are, in English Reading Order (top to bottom, left to right)
Parasite then Scent of Fear
Friendly Organic then Friendly Organic in Trouble

I'm afraid that totally black-and-white colourblind people may have some difficulty with the 'friendly' hexagonish stuff, though there are brightness-variations, but the others are all differentiated in very noticable ways just by their shapes.

And if anyone's curious how I did the hexagons, they're actually spheres lit from seven lights to form the hexagonish pattern. For the 'rainbow' effect, I built up randomly-phase-shifted Sine waves for the red, green, and blue values of the outer lights, normalized each frame to the same 'brightness' overall across the entire hexagon.

Might help if I actually attached the file...

oh dear me.. these most certainly are worthy of the title "sweetest of the sweet sweet sweeting sweetness"

good job on the HUD and the hivesight!

now, i only need to figure out how to recolor these things. (/me wants red HUD for marines)

I think the 2 most helpful programs for this are called SprView (you can save the .spr as a .bmp to edit) and SprWiz (converts the .bmps back to .sprs). Both are small and free and available in this zip:

crosshair edititng pack

pad, your link doesn't work

Any news on when your sprites site will be up, Necro?

If you folks want a red Marine HUD recolour, I can do that pretty quickly. :-)

What parts of the HUD did you want recoloured? This for Commander view, or just basic Grunt view?

As an off-note, I do have a 'red pack' that recolours most of the Marines view models if you're using the 'Red Marines' pack, and I'm slowly working on a 'Blood Pack' to recolour all the structures and their guns and such as well as their armor.

Those are extremely good, but there's one problem... the rainbow rends to blend in with the white hexagons and it's hard to see for a moment... which is why the red was so nice. Other than that, very nice.

QUOTE (Necro- @ Nov 24 2002, 09:04 AM)

pad, your link doesn't work

Seems to work for me... if you can't DL it, maybe go to www.bullseyecrosshairs.com and look under half-life.

works for me also

Oh god, the current NS HUD should be as simple and rewarding as that one!

Very kick **obscenity** sprites there WolfWings.

Good job with the hud too Carbon.