Nyerguds

...you know my site is an open directory, right? You could just have gone to the /tutorials/ folder to find it. Anyway, link is fixed.

Cleaner images, too.

Quite. I still don't quite get what those .h files are.

Why do you use fraps for screenshots? If you have cnc-ddraw you can just press ctrl+s.

Psh. Really, even I just do that in the editor, and I do practically everything mission related in the ini Do note xcc's 'base' function doesn't work unless you manually add the "Count=" into the section.

I dunno. It's just, bytes. No rules, no conventions, just bytes

Meh. C# and Java are just so much easier.

Solo... there's nothing hard about the formula. With "mod" being the "remainder after division" function, it's just (CELL / 64)*16777216 + (CELL mod 64)*256

well, one is a file browser, the other an editor. It kinda makes sense. I find it stranger that he added some editing features in the Mixer but not all of them. If he had added no editing features in XCC Mixer, everyone would very quickly know that XCC Mix Editor was there. If he added them all in XCC Mixer, XCC Mix Editor wouldn't be needed. But now you just have people not knowing of Mix Editor, and being stuck with the crippled editing functions in XCC Mixer

I usually use Paint Shop Pro 3, because it has excellent palette support, but it's a 16-bit windows program, meaning it doesn't run on 64-bit OSes. Any app with good 256-colour palette-support should do though. My purple palettes pack only has PSP format, but it also has the mixfile for XCC, so if you use XCC to convert any SHP to PNG with a specific palette, you can use whatever editor you want to save that palette from the image, so that way you can convert all the palettes to whatever format you want.

That manual is based on a very old manual written around 1996, and it mentions a lot of old DOS tools. You don't need them though; CCMap supports rebuilding. If I remember correctly you can just right-click on any building and set a checkbox that determines whether the AI will rebuild it. As for that exact number, if you really want to know how to calculate it by hand, well...the method IS in the ccmanual file. Basically, you take the map cell number the building is on, divide it by 64 (since all maps have a width of 64), and then quotient is Y, and the remainder is X. With that X and Y, you get the number by doing [16777216*Y + 256*X]. These numbers may seem random, but hexadecimally, that's 1000000(hex)*Y+100(hex)*X, or in bytes, simply YY.00.XX.00) To make it more clear... if you take the example value of the ccmanual file, namely "436212992", put it in the Windows calculator, and then switch it to hexadecimal mode (you need to use the scientific / programming view for that), you'll see it transform to "1A 00 15 00", meaning Y=1A(hex) and X=15(hex). Convert these numbers to decimal individually, and you'll see Y=26 and X=21, meaning the cell number of the building is (26*64)+21=1685. This whole conversion can perfectly be done both ways. And no, I don't have a fricking clue why Westwood made it so complicated instead of just using the cell numbers

Source would always be handy, but tbh, I don't know C++, and I DO know assembler

Looks like you got the gif done after all

C&C was completely rewritten, from the ground up. Some internal concepts are the same, and a few file types (WSA, CPS, and the Dune II SHP format used by C&C and RA's mouse cursor), but that's it.

Eh? You mean XCC Mixer, right? XCC Mix Editor can do all of that. And yeah, I know RAED can't read unencrypted mixfiles. btw, XCC Mixer can also compact, by right-clicking on the mixfile before you open it. It's one of the lowest options in the list.

Indeed. And succeeding too.

...holy crap. That unitinfo file has stuff my editor doesn't have yet. They did an awesome job on this.

Of course it's separate. But in your setup it's EMPTY. You can just as well put all original files back in there. As for a good mix editor, just use XCC Mix Editor. NOT "XCC Mixer". It's a different tool included in the pack. Though if you use it to make new mix-files, make sure that you set the mixfile type to RA1 BEFORE dropping files into it. And always use the "compact" function to save.

That's just how TS SHP format works. The frames are cut out, but it remembers their position in the frame. If you look at some more TS SHP files in XCC Mixer, you'll notice they're ALL like that. It's normal. Nothing is resized. If you convert it back to PNG it looks fine. What exactly did you copy and paste as SHP? It should only be done with PNG or PCX files, and you have to make sure to give the correct dimensions and number of frames.

Well yes, but the set-up you just showed had an empty redalert.mix.

Personally I'd just arrange it just like the original game has it, but with main.mix in your game folder. It's what TFD does. The only special thing that needs to be taken into account then is that all videos have to go into movies1.mix, and you don't need a movies2.mix

Um, I just did "copy as PNG" in XCC so it converted it as multiple frames, and then dumped all those frame files into the Layers window of Gimp. It supports file drag & drop. btw, I just posted on PPM how you can use XCC to convert one bug PNG into a SHP with multiple frames: http://ppmsite.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=426731#426706 [edit] All right, what I did was a bit more complex than that... I'll explain in detail: -Copy the SHP as PNG frames. -Divide the frames in turret frames and body frames. I used a rename tool to rename the turret ones so they start from 000. -Use XCC to make TS SHP files from these 2 frame sets, to get a SHP for the turret and one for the body. -Convert both body and turret SHPs to a single PNG file. -Open the body PNG in Gimp. Drag the Turret PNG into the Layers window. -Right-click on the turret layer in the Layers window, and select "add alpha channel". -Use the Select By Colour function to select the background of the turret layer, and press [Del] to clear it so it becomes transparent. (make sure you converted it with a palette where the background is NOT black, otherwise you get errors). -Make sure the turret layer is above the body layer, and merge the two layers. Save the now-complete unit rotation with turret as a new PNG. -Use the method from the PPM link to copy that PNG to a TS SHP with all (32) frames -Copy that SHP as PNG frames -Open frame 000 in Gimp -Dump all the other frames (001 to 031) into the Layers window of Gimp, and move the layers around to correct their order. -(optional) Stretch it to 2x size, with pure pixel resize method (no interpolation). Note that if the image is still Indexed it never uses interpolation anyway. -Save as .gif, and make sure to select the "save layers as animation" option. If you're not using a transparent background for the GIF, you could use the Gimp option "Filters -> animation -> Optimize for GIF" to make the gif file take less space by working with layers that only contain the changed pixels, but this doesn't work well if the gif has a transparent background. If you want to give the GIF a transparent background (I didn't, because it made the black antennae invisible on this forum's background), you have to add an alpha channel to ALL of the 32 frames, and then use the same colour selection method used for the turret to clear the backgrounds. This is a lot of work though, since there's no way to automate it. You just need to do it 32 times. Note that the turret fixing method doesn't work on all units. If you look at C&C's SSM Launcher, Rocket Launcher, Mobile HQ (RA's Radar Jammer) or RA's Mobile Gap Generator, you'll see the turret is moved by the game itself to be on the back of the vehicle, while it is centered in the SHP graphics. So this method won't work for units like that. For most tanks it works fine though, since their turret is perfectly centered. And with this method you can adjust the height of the turret on the body just fine, by moving the layer a bit.

What are aerials? [edit]You mean the antennae?[/edit] As for making GIF animations, Gimp can do that... you just add the frames as layers, save it as GIF, and tell it to use the layers as animation. It even has a function to optimize the frames by using transparent cumulative layers where only the changes are added. But adding the turret, well, that's a whole other thing. The positioning rules for turrets are kinda fuzzy in C&C. [edit] This is with the turret just centered on it...

No, DOS programs are tricky that way... REAL 32-bit DOS programs don't exist, since DOS isn't 32-bit. They always have to start from 16-bit code and then do some ugly tricks to switch to 32-bit. That's exactly what a disassembler does... basically, once it knows where to start it can simply follow all possible paths the game can follow, and identify all code correctly that way. Though for that to work correctly, it needs to know absolutely every CPU instruction, of course. Also note that functions that exist in the exe, but are never called or referenced anywhere, won't be identified, unless you go to their start point and tell the program to start scanning from that point again. The fact most compilers align their function starts to 16 bytes makes this quite easy though. That way I found out C&C contains unused ini write functions for the unit/structure/etc sections; another leftover of its inbuilt map editor. Once you follow a path, and correctly follow the rules of expanding opcodes, your scanner should be emulating what the actual X86 CPU does, and you should never end up in data. But you'll see a lot of code appear that LINKS to data without jumping or calling to it, and that way you can identify what is data.

Looks like another small optimization makes the Players= tag completely obsolete... the game now simply counts the amount of valid waypoints under #12