New HUD Target Images

Can you come up with a new hud image for this?

oxford.png
 
Sure. Two questions:

1. What is it? It look very close to the agricultural planet, obviously, but it doesn't match my source art.

2. Do you really want me to draw it squished vertically like that?
 
John Cordell said:
1. Oxford.

2. Yes.
Click to expand...
I don't remember oxford being different hehe. If it is, and you have the time, might as well make a variation of the ag world hud.

No, don't draw it squished. it looks that way as a result of the original game's 320x200 resolution, which has a different aspect ratio than most things we play to day. Using 320x200 instead of 320x240 means that when you view them on a modern display, screenshots look a little squished, but it would have been round in the original. (as round as a jaggy low res sprite can be lol)
 
MamiyaOtaru said:
No, don't draw it squished. it looks that way as a result of the original game's 320x200 resolution, which has a different aspect ratio than most things we play to day. Using 320x200 instead of 320x240 means that when you view them on a modern display, screenshots look a little squished, but it would have been round in the original. (as round as a jaggy low res sprite can be lol)
Click to expand...

planet2.png


The (new) new detroid hud is also "squished", when it looked like this in the original why round it up now?
 
Hmmm.

I drew New Detroit squished for 1.1. I asked if it was ok. Everyone said it was. Based on that, I should draw Oxford squished, too. Or, I should redraw New Detroit round, and draw Oxford round, and both can go into 1.2 or whatever is coming next.

Argue amongst yourselves. :)
 
John Cordell said:
when it looked like this in the original why round it up now?
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Because it didn't look like that in the original! Let's see how I can spell this out for you.

Planets are round, no way they shouldn't look that way in the remake, especially since they did in the original. They look flat in screenshots of the original, but try expanding those screenshots to full screen, and you will see why the ratio needs to be adjusted: the expanded image won't be tall enough to fill the screen.

To make the original 320x200 cockpit images fit on a 1024x768 screen, you have to multiply the width by 3.2, but you have to multiply the height by 3.84. The cockpit image was fullscreen in the original, and it is fullscreen now, but we had to increase the height more than we had to increase the width. The same goes for HUD images. To keep the same relative dimensions in our resolution as they had in the original, the height has to be increased more than the width. What I'm saying here is it's ridiculous to flatten HUD images, either planets or ships (I hope you didn't do that). If we do that, we might as well flatten the cockpit images too so they don't fill the whole vertical area of the screen. It's all due to 320/200 = 1.6 not being the same ratio as 1024/768 = 1.33 or 1280/1024 = 1.25..

More simply put, on a 320x200 screen, a pixel is significantly taller than it is wide. This is no longer true. We no longer have to adjust for that by using fewer pixels vertically then we do horizontally to make a round object.

A more accurate representation of how the planet HUD image would actually have appeared on your screen back then is achieved by multiplying the height by 1.2 (240/200), which takes the different aspect ratio into account. (320/240=1.33, same ratio as our 1024x768 and close to 1280/1024). Do that, and the pixel width is the same as the height.
 

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I know what you meant, even in the original art they are sometimes squished and sometimes round. I've attached some images which shows that the planet is also squished in the manual and the source new detroid art is too, but therefore detroid is round in the manual and the source art of the planet is round. Well, i would prefer them to be a little bit squished because that's the way i remember them.

planet3.png
 
Sorry for the ensuing verbosity.. this is a bit of a last ditch attempt at conveying a truth: hopefully something in there will cause a little light to go on. If not, it is obviously fruitless to continue discussing it with you, but just because you don't understand doesn't mean I am wrong.
John Cordell said:
Well, i would prefer them to be a little bit squished because that's the way i remember them.
Click to expand...
Then you remember it wrong, or all you can remember is screenshots or playing it in windowed mode in DOSbox. I guarantee that if you play the original Privateer in fullscreen and take a picture with a digital camera, the planet HUD will be as tall as it is wide. It is fewer pixels in height, because at 320x200 fullscreen, pixels are taller than they are wide. They adjusted for that by using fewer pixels for the height, otherwise it would have appeared too tall. They adjusted it as they had to to make it appear round, so why the hell would we adjust it to make it appear not round? we no longer need to compensate for weird aspect ratios. We are making it look as it originally looked, not as it looks now in improperly resized screenshots. We are not going to pander to a decade of memories of looking at screenshots on monitors with different aspect ratios than the monitors on which the game was played and for which it was designed.

Once more: as simple as I can make it. Take an original screenshot and stretch it to fit full screen on 1024x768. You will have to stretch vertically more than you stretch horizontally, and will in the process desquish the cockpit and everything else, including the HUD image. Desquishing was done on the cockpits (back when we used screenshots of the original) and the cockpit instruments. Why the hell wouldn't we do it with the HUD images?

Please actually try that, and tell me the pixel dimensions of the resulting planet HUD. Actually, I'll just do it here (but I encourage you to try it yourself if you think I doctored things). Here's a screenshot (including oxford HUD) in its original size, and then enlarged to fit a 1024x768 screen. Open the second up in paint and tell me how wide and how tall the planet HUD image is (hint: the two numbers are very similar ;) ).
 

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(continued in a new post, so attached pictures in previous post appear underneath the text that talks about them)

Let's use some math here. My 19" monitor is 14.25" wide and 10.75" tall. At 1024x768, each pixel is .0139" (14.25/1024) wide and .014" (10.75/768) tall. Now let's play privateer in a window, or look at a screenshot. The Oxford HUD image is 58 pixels by 48 pixels. It thus appears .806" (.0139*58) wide and only .672" (.014*48) tall. Squished. And wrong. Why do I say that?

Let's play the same game now in fullscreen, like we all played Privateer back in '93. At 320x200, each pixel is .0445" (14.25/320) wide and .0538" (10.75/200) tall. The same HUD image with the same 58x48 pixel size now appears 2.581" (.0445*58) wide and .2582" (.0538*48) tall. Not squished.

It did not look squished then, it should not now.
 
"It did not look squished then, it should not now."

Mami is absolutely right about it, my mistake, i'm sorry if i confused someone.
Where's the new Oxford hud image? ;)
 
John Cordell said:
Where's the new Oxford hud image? ;)
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Haha, I've been waiting for you two to finish duking it out. :)

I'll draw it soon. Should I redraw the New Detroit image as well? It's squished in its current form.
 
I think you don't need to redraw Detroid we can simply strech it a little bit, but you could use the time instead to come up with hud images for cargo items.
Deadline for the next version is end of July...
 
Talking about next version... ¿Any idea of what has to be done for the next version? Perhaps I could help with something C-related.
 
Well the next release will be the "purist" version which i'm currently working on (sticked thread "Proper Remake"), if you want to help i contact you in July because i'm currently very busy... Hellcat has a todo list of things that need to be implemented into the code - the remake 1.1 already features some of the stuff ;)
 
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