Having Trouble with the cicn Resource

any ideas?

Alright guys, your first peek at some of the stuff I've been doing for HOTS. It's also about all the graphics I can do.

Anyway, I'm making custom cicn resources for HOTS. For those of you who don't know, the cicn resources are the little bracket things that surround planets, stations, and ships when you target them. However, my custom cicns refuse to display properly. As far as I can tell, I've done everything correctly.

This link will get you a plug-in containing only the cicn resources. You may notice that only the top right, bottom left, and bottom right corners for each set are in there and the top left corner is missing for all sets. This is because that corner is working perfectly fine. They're also the only cicns I didn't make. Rather, I'm borrowing them from the Lizard King's Empire line of TCs for EVC. You remember, the ones that told you what you were targeting? Anyway...

So the cicns I've made won't work right. Anyone have any idea why not? They do display, but they display as if the mask was off center.

** Edit:** In regards to the mask being off center, I know it isn't, I checked. The mask is where it's supposed to be.

This post has been edited by darthkev : 05 March 2010 - 03:00 PM

You're making these with ResEdit, are you?

Do they have the same pixel dimensions as the icons that work?

From my testing on an Intel MacBook Pro running OS X 10.6, in chronological order of what I did:

In MissionComputer 4.0.7 running as an Intel application, the graphical picker shows the cicn resources messed up.

In MissionComputer 4.0.7 running as an Intel application, opening a cicn resource shows it the way it is supposed to be.

In ResEdit under OS 9 the cicn resources appear correctly.

In EV Nova 1.1 running as an Intel application, the cicn resources appear messed up.

In EV Nova 1.0.A the cicn resources appear correctly.

In MissionComputer 4.0.7 set to open under Rosetta, the graphical picker shows the cicn resources the way they are supposed to be.

In EV Nova 1.1 set to open under Rosetta, the cicn resources appear correctly.

So it looks like something about Intel-native applications that improperly display the cicn resources. Next questions: Why does this happen? Is it something about the resources? Can it be overcome?

When I just made new cicn resources from scratch in ResEdit they seemed to work properly under Nova 1.1 and MissionComputer run as native Intel applications. I'll do a bit more investigating when I have time.

Edit: I confirm it is a problem with the cicn resources in your plug-in. I do not know exactly what the problem is, but I know that when I make very-similar cicn resources from scratch in ResEdit they work as expected.

This post has been edited by Qaanol : 05 March 2010 - 04:01 PM

QUOTE (Qaanol @ Mar 5 2010, 03:52 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

In MissionComputer 4.0.7 running as an Intel application, the graphical picker shows the cicn resources messed up.
In MissionComputer 4.0.7 running as an Intel application, opening a cicn resource shows it the way it is supposed to be.
...
In MissionComputer 4.0.7 set to open under Rosetta, the graphical picker shows the cicn resources the way they are supposed to be.

When you open a cicn resource, MissionComputer uses its own cicn decoder (the first stages towards a native cicn editor that may arrive someday). The graphical picker, however, calls on the standard Resource Manager routines. This is, I presume, what the game itself does.

We can therefore determine that there's something about this particular cicn resource that, while not necessarily invalid, confuses the Intel-native version of the Resource Manager (which has a few bugs and oddities of its own). I haven't done enough research into this particular aspect of cicns to be able to say more from the information provided.

Good point DA, we don't know if there is an actual problem with the resources or just with the way they are handled on Intel now. In any case, ResEdit makes cicn resources that are handled properly.

dk: here is a plug-in containing fixed versions of the cicn resources you uploaded: cicnFix.rez.zip (1.98K)
Number of downloads: 2
What I did was open your plug-in in ResEdit, create a new file with ResEdit, create a new cicn resource in the new file, set it to the same size (16×16) open a cicn resource from your file in ResEdit, select its entire color image, copy and paste into the color image of the new cicn, select the entire mask of the cicn and copy that onto the mask of the new cicn, and repeat for all cicn resources in your file. Simply copying the resources did not fix the problem, but copying the images did.

To try to understand exactly what the problem was, I made a plug-in with all the same cicn resources you had but I changed all the masks to be the whole 16×16 image. The following picture shows what it looked like in-game when the bad images were not cut off by the masks:

And here is what it looks like with my fixed version:

Thanks Qaanol. I actually used the cicn resources from EVN itself. I edited them with Rezilla. I would've responded sooner, but was out all day today.

This post has been edited by darthkev : 05 March 2010 - 10:56 PM

QUOTE (darthkev @ Mar 5 2010, 10:55 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I edited them with Rezilla.

Interesting — I don't know much about Rezilla. Was it running Intel-native, or in Rosetta?

I'll see if I can find anything interesting by comparing your icons with Qaanol's versions. Perhaps there's something distinctive about the resources that Rezilla generates.

It was running Intel-native, I don't have Rosetta. I'm also on a MacBook running OSX 10.5.2 if that helps.

This post has been edited by darthkev : 06 March 2010 - 04:02 PM

The version of Rezilla I have always runs under Rosetta since it's a PowerPC app.

Darthkev: Get Info on your EV Nova 1.1.app and you should see a checkbox labeled Open using Rosetta. I know I do in OS X 10.6. Opening under Rosetta is an option for all Universal applications.

Get Info on Rezilla and you should not see that checkbox. What you should see near the top is Kind: Application (PowerPC) whereas in the Get Info for something like EV Nova 1.1 or MissionComputer 4.0.7 you'll see Kind: Application (Universal).

This post has been edited by Qaanol : 06 March 2010 - 08:43 PM

Ok, I guess I was wrong then, and my copy of Rezilla was running in Rosetta. Thanks for pointing that out, Qaanol.