The new WWG storefront is finally live!
http://www.worldworksgames.com/store/index.php
Denny has posted a thorough overview of the new shiny blinky bits here:
http://www.worldworksgames.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=10010
Oh, and the Brio and Interceptor are now available alongside Streets of Titan as well!
The HL 300 and the Podtel will follow sometime in August.
I’ve been getting a *lot* of requests for custom schemes for the Interceptor. Unfortunately for most of the folks requesting extra schemes, I’m not gonna spend the rest of my life doing every single police scheme in the entire world for $2.50. Fortunately for these folks, though, I did make it easier for them to do their own schemes.
It wasn’t easy, but I managed to figure out how to do editable versions of the Brio and Interceptor that supported a lowest-common-denominator subset of the Photoshop file format that any paint package capable of reading PSD files should handle fine. That means you can open them in free paint apps like the GIMP, or inexpensive paint apps like Photoshop Elements or Paint Shop Pro.
As long as you don’t touch the topmost two layers in the PSDs (page frame and texture), you can color all you want or paste logos and stuff into the layers below them. The results won’t be exactly the same as if I did it myself because my normal layer setup is a lot more complex than that, but it’ll come reasonably close-ish, and you won’t have to extract anything from PDFs or do anything more complicated than flood filling or using brush tools.
Matt Lyon suggested a Hong Kong Police Force variant of the Battenburg livery, and I threw in a Swedish variant while I was at it.
Accordingly, I’ve updated the Department of Motor Vehicles page with new license plate sheets for Sweden and Hong Kong.
Getting it ready for final review. I took some time to put together a few images for you guys.
Group shot showing the 4 different police versions and the 4 unmarked colors:
Things of note: there are 8 different unit numbers for the classic and sci-fi blue versions, which each have their own PDF. The European PDF includes the UK version plus 5 versions of the blue-over-silver with police markings in different languages.
The third PDF includes the 4 unmarked schemes. I included a dingy white and a hideous beige for unmarked/retired police vehicles, while the silver is an unmarked detective car, and the black is supposed to be useful for FBI and government types. The unmarked versions don’t have the same set of lighting hardware as the marked versions–the areas where the light set is normally installed have been covered up with plug-in panels, and a wigwag headlight/running light setup is used instead. The fleet shop can convert Interceptors from one version to another by popping off the plug-in panels and installing the necessary hardware or vice versa. They don’t fool anyone any more than an unmarked Crown Victoria does, either.
Here are some shots of the model frame and instructions:
I’m pleased that it stayed within the 1 page/10 parts budget–I was a little worried because of the unusual geometry.
I still have to do a couple more things, but it’ll be ready to zip up and turn in for final review at WWG before I go to bed.
I figured out how to abuse the data-driven graphics feature of Photoshop CS5 even further so I could use it to spool out cars with unique shop numbers and roof numbers. This time, more pictures and less boring text.
First, I set up the texture PSD file of the classic Interceptor scheme as a template. This involves just creating variables and assigning them to layers.
The next thing I did was set up a comma delimited text file to use as the data set source, in good old Notepad:
Yes, that’s it. Just a list of values.
Once both of those things are set up, a few button clicks in Photoshop will change the text layer strings and save each change out as a separate file:
A bit of duplicating and re-merging in Ultimate Papercraft 3D gives me an 8-up layout, and all of the materials have been reassigned to the new texture variants:
I also spent a few minutes tweaking a copy of the OpenOffice layout template to work with the 8-up version:
Okay, all of that is just a one-time setup thing. I literally only have to do that once. From this point on, I can simply copy the Ultimate Papercraft 3D and OpenOffice 8-up templates to another folder, and after assigning variables to any other scheme, I can painlessly export a different 8-up without tediously editing a lot of layers and saving things out by hand.
The only real limit on how many variations I can include in a single PDF is completely dependent on the amount of video RAM and system RAM on my machine, and the amount of work needed to set up the unique variations is much less than it used to be when I had to do them all individually by hand. Nice. I definitely could get used to this feature.Note: Don’t worry about how odd the texturing looks. The model is currently wearing a baked global illumination lightmap, which is the source of all the shading, and that lightmap is only used to make the Metasequoia work-in-progress screenshots look a bit nicer. I usually crank the lightmap opacity almost all the way down when exporting paper models for real, so the PDF won’t be anywhere nearly that harshly shaded.