Animated Flags

[catty-cb 4,394]

A couple of months ago I was asked by @adsii1970 if I still had a copy of this tutorial

As luck would have it,  I had a paper printout of the tutorial tucked away in a box, unfortunately no pictures, anyway I PMed him a copy of it and am also going to add a copy of it here as a just in case backup.

Quote

I just released my version of an animated south African flag on the Simtropolis exchange, and I've had one or two inquiries as to how it done.

Rather than tell people through PMs etc, I thought a (hopefully) simple tutorial might be in order.

However, before I start, credit where it's due. I shall be using Ilive's Reader and Dark Matter's Fishman programs.

Also, I based my new flag.dat on Pegasus's "One Flag Many Nations" lot. Although this may not now be available for people who have not already downloaded it, the method should work if you extract the relevant files from Maxis's American or Canadian flag lots from the official SimCity 4 site.

The process is really just a series of simple steps really, with just one huge tricky one in the middle!!!

Step One

Load the flag.dat file of your choice into the reader, and highlight the FSH file

Step Two

Save the decoded file by right-clicking over the shaded FSH file. When the dialog appears, choose the folder you want to save in and also type in the name you want to save to. IMPORTANT don't forget to add .fsh to the name you choose, the program will not this for you. This step will save two files, YOURNAME.fsh and YOURNAME.fsh.TGI

You won't need to do anything with the TGI file, but it has to be there. IMPORTANT once you saved the decoded file, Remove the FSH file in the original.dat file (using the same method) and save the whole .dat file to a new name, eg YOURNAME.dat

Step Three

Open the Fishman program and then open the YOURNAME.fsh file, expand the Bitmap part of the tree and you should see something like the screen-shot below

The flag animations use seven different bitmaps and you are going to have to save each one twice.

All the seven different bitmaps have two versions: ColorOnly and AlphaOnly. For Bitmap #1 make sure that the drop-down box shows ColorOnly and save the bitmap as image1.bmp. IMPORTANT make sure the Save As Type drop-down box is on Windows Bitmap. Once you have done this, change the top drop-down box to AlphaOnly, the image will change to a simple black and white version with the flags in silhouette only. Save this image as before but as image1a.bmp.

Repeat this for all seven bitmaps, saving as image2, image2a etc.

Step Four

This is the tricky one! Open all of the imageN.bmp's in your favourite image manipulating program and redesign every single image on all seven ColorOnly bitmaps to the flag of your choice. (I wish you good luck and good patience!) There is of course no need to do anything to the AlphaOnly images.

Step Five

Assuming you haven't given up yet, once you have got a new set of image1.bmp, image2.bmp etc, its time to reintegrate them back into an .fsh file. Go back into Fishman, open up the YOURNAME.fsh file and delete all seven of the original bitmaps by rightclicking on them and selecting remove.

Step Six

Rightclick on the Bitmap part of the tree, select Insert and then Bitmap

You should now have the dialog box as shown below. IMPORTANT you must insert your modified Bitmap files in the original order. Use the browse selectors to locate your modified image1.bmp ColorOnly file and the original image1a.bmp AlphaOnly files. Next, and this is IMPORTANT select the FSH Bitmap Type to be "... with Alpha". Once done, press OK and repeat for image2 etc.

Step Seven

When you have inserted all seven ColorOnly and AlphaOnly pairs of Bitmaps, save the whole file as YOURNAME.fsh (you may want to change the filename to YOURNAME1.fsh)

Step Eight

Go back into the Reader and open the previously saved YOURNAME.dat file. Rightclick anywhere under the list of files in the middle panel and choose "Insert & Compress file". Navigate to the YOURNAME1.fsh file and press "open".

You should then get the warning message "No entry selected, Append to end?". Select "Yes".

Step Nine

You should now have a file list with your FSH file at the bottom of it. IMPORTANT you must now rightclick again in the empty part of the middle panel and choose "Rebuild Directory File". Once you have pressed this, nothing seems to happen, but believe me it has, and without it all your work will have been for nought.

Step Ten

Save the whole.dat file, place in your Plugins directory and enjoy. (If you are using Pegasus "One Flag ... " lot, make sure that this is the only .dat file of this type in there).

Hopefully all of the above is clear. Apologies if some of steps might seem obvious to the more experienced modders out there, but I myself have found that when following some tutorials, some of the simplest unexplained steps are the ones that catch me out.

[adsii1970 85]

I haven't forgotten... I've been hit by the real world...

[catty-cb 4,394]

12 hours ago, adsii1970 said:

I've been hit by the real world...

same here ....and it wasn't a hint just ....as most people know Paeng left the SC4 community a couple of years ago after a bout of ill health, he has since then been extremely active in the Banished communities unfortunately that's now come to an end and no one has been able to contact him for a few months, he's got two websites, the first was his SC4 site and that's already got major issues in that you can no longer download any files from it

http://paeng.e-workers.de/gallery/city_journals/index.php

The second is his Banished site here

https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/banishedpeople/index.php

The last time he was on site was back in December last year ... anyway it got me thinking re losing stuff and that lead to posting the tutorial document so at least its now with you, me, this post and the simtrop staff who have a backup of my website in case I disappear, not that I'm planning on disappearing

-catty

[Shuna Tempest 25]

Es wäre cool wenn man die schritte besser erklären könnte, leider scheitere ich schon bei schritt zwei Da heißt das man die SFH Datei anklicken soll und dann speichern soll aber wie ? wenn ich die rechte maus taste klicke kommt ne liste mit mehrere optionen was man anklicken kann aber da ist nichts was ich mit nem namen speichern kann

[catty-cb 4,394]

Hi @Shuna Tempest

Sorry I've only just noticed your post, I'm afraid I can't help as those instructions were written by another member who unfortunately is no longer with us and by the time I noticed the topic was gone I only had the hardcopy print I'd made of them  

google translate = Es tut mir leid, dass ich gerade erst Ihren Beitrag bemerkt habe, ich fürchte, ich kann nicht helfen, da diese Anweisungen von einem anderen Mitglied geschrieben wurden, das leider nicht mehr bei uns ist und als ich bemerkte, dass das Thema verschwunden war, hatte ich nur den Hardcopy-Druck, den ich daraus gemacht hatte