Creating our own .png icons

from Elemental Forums

Hello fellow modders.

After finally getting other peoples mods to work, I can now start trying to create a few of my own. I decided I would start off simple and create a small range of coloured cloaks (because it always bugs me in game when all my champions cloaks are miss matched :) )

I have gotten my cloaks working and showing up in game fine and they are all the right colours however it bugs me that their .png icon is the standard brown scouts cloak icon. So I delved into the main game files in "programfiles\stardockgames\elemental\Gfx\items" and found the scouts cloak .png which I have made a copy of. Now a bit of fiddleing around in photoshop will allow me to make various new coloured versions of the png. However at this moment in time the only way I know to get the game to recognise these new .png files is to place the newly named coloured files back into "programfiles\stardockgames\elemental\Gfx\items". This works... but am I right in thinking next time stardock update my newly added .pngs will get overwritten? 

The big question I guess is does anyone know if theres a way to get the game to recognise .png's that are placed somewhere in the "mydocuments\mygames\elemental\..." folder? 

2,071 views 2 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

As long as your new .png's have Unique Names they should be fine as long as the directory isn't deleted. The game hasn't had a directory wipe since going from Beta to Launch, so unless that happens again you should be all good. Just in case I recommend keeping a back-up of all your created .png's just in case.

~ Raven

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

Thanks for the clarification. Ok brilliant I can get on with making my mod now.

EDIT: also while we are on the subject I notice in the XML coding for an item there is a tint tag for the items png eg <TintB> but it doesn't seem to do anything. Anybody know why?.

Star Control: Origins