How to Make Splash Screens? Help Please

[mongoose]

I defer to the Major. get me some nice NJ v. BC night shots and I'll bow down!

 

[MajorMagee]

For some reason Imgur adds an annoying magenta color-shift to these night shots that is not in the originals.

 

[Dutch_P47M]

Were is the SPAD plane from, is it WOFF?

 

[MajorMagee]

It's actually from back in the Phase 3 / OFF days. I created a Modified version of it with the traditional CFS3 front end to make it easier to play QC, since I never really got drawn into their campaign only dead-is-dead mindset.

 

[mongoose]

Pretty good! I like the 2nd one especially as I still think the ground shows up too much at night. Even with a full moon I feel it should be more grey tones if anything.

 

[MajorMagee]

It was a full moon, and I brightened the picture so you'd have a chance of seeing the night fighter they were shooting at. It was actually pretty dark looking at it live.

If you want the terrain at night to be darker there are parameters in the suneffect.xml that control that. The version I provided for use with AnKor's shaders are a lot darker than the CFS3 defaults, but you can edit them to something even darker if you like.

 

[mongoose]

Ah! Missed the night fighter. Any chance of grey scale land at night or would that involve terrain changes and night eras only (which I have)?

I have used this way back which is not too bad. Might resurrect it.

 

[gecko]

Andy, the code you posted was a nice improvement over what I had before, thanks!

 

[mongoose]

To make a full size jpeg work for me I had to turn off scaling, and center the position.

Original:
<Dialog Image="common_screens\splash.bmp" ScaleToScreen="Yes" ZOrder="Background" Clippable="No"/>

Revised:
<Dialog Image="common_screens\splash.jpg" ScaleToScreen="No" ZOrder="Background" Clippable="No" Position="Center"/>

There are 3 splash screens:-

The splash24b being changed (in ETO) through the era batch file. I changed this to a jpg and enlarged it. That seemed to mess up my install and CTD
There are 2 in the uires folder. I changed both to jpgs. there are 2 files in the dialogs folder (dlgsplash and dlgsplash2). I changed both to

<Dialog Image="common_screens\splash.jpg" ScaleToScreen="Yes" ZOrder="Background" Clippable="No" Position="Center"/>

The result was centered but not scaled to screen. I changed them back to bmps and they scaled to screen.


What I imagine you mean; or at least it;s what I want, is the original picture is either screen size (1920 x 1080 in my case), or scaled up to it; and only then made into the 3 splash screens. You dialog entries would then ensure that all were full screen. ??

 

[MajorMagee]

Yes, if I remember correctly the jpg format does not work with CFS3'c code for scale to screen, so make the file the size you want to display. The center command is needed to keep it from being shifted to the bottom and clipped.

I'm not sure what the Era selector might be doing to get in the way of this working, but since it renames files it's probably just a matter of presenting it with the right names (meaning bmp and not jpg) so it can change them when it wants to. The only way around this would be to update the ETO startup script.

p.s. I've also noticed that the CFS3 display code for this adds an overall layer of random noise dithering so your picture won't be as clear as the original screenshot you took. My guess is that they were assuming that the small size 16 bit files they were using would need some dithering to make them presentable.