starwars opening editing

[SuckyModderDave]

i noticed in the episode 3 mod that he actually changed the opening storyline scroller to his plotline. Does anyone know how to edit the opening starwars scrolling thing??

[War Master]

Rant begins here ... ( I tried hinting at the solution a while back by telling people to open up the text_crawl shader and look at the different versions of the text_crawl, you've got a french one, a spanish one etc... Do you think Raven made a seperate ROQ file for each language? Of course not! Some still insisted "You have to make a ROQ file, that's the only way to do it." There's too much misinformation going around on this forum. Some people don't want you to know this information.(I love conspiracy theories)) ... rant ends here

 

I made my text "shader" with Paint shop pro. The proper font is Franklin Gothic Medium. Raven didn't use the right font. (I'm not going to go into detail because this is not a tutorial.) The size should be 512x2048 with a black background. Put your text on it and chose a light yellow to match Raven's Star Wars logo. Paint Shop Pro doesn't have a justify option so you'll have to adjust your text yourself. After your text is done select the black background and make it into an alpha channel. Save your work as tc_engl.tga. Make a directory like this menu/video and put the tga inside it. Put everything in your gamedata folder and make a pk3 file out of it. Make a new folder called NewScroll and put the pk3 inside. Start up JK2 and load your mod and load Kejim_post. If you did it right you should see your new text scroll. Again, this is not a tutorial it's just a general explanation. If someone wants to write a tutorial on it I'll give them all the detail info.

[War Master]

If you want it to run with your own map use a script like this

 

//Generated by BehavEd

 

rem ( "THE STAR WARS TEXT CRAWL" );

set ( /*@SET_TYPES*/ "SET_VIDEO_PLAY", "jk0101_sw" );

camera ( /*@CAMERA_COMMANDS*/ ENABLE );

camera ( /*@CAMERA_COMMANDS*/ MOVE, $tag( "cam_start", ORIGIN)$, 0 );

camera ( /*@CAMERA_COMMANDS*/ PAN, $tag( "cam_start", ANGLES)$, < 0.000 0.000 0.000 >, 0 );

camera ( /*@CAMERA_COMMANDS*/ DISABLE );

[-Chrono_MOT-]

No, that's not what you do at all. You have the concept right but you mess up right at the part where you make the text.

 

The font is correct, you use Franklin Gothic Bold for the Episode Number, Franklin Gothic Demi for the Episode text, and you can download the Star Wars Episode Title if you search on google for Star Wars fonts (I believe it's called Star Wars Crawl).

 

Then, open up a new image sized at 512x2048 as he said. Paint the ENTIRE thing black. Write your text in white, justify it as you need to, then create an alpha channel. Select the entire image, copy and paste it into the alpha channel. Then, select the rest of the image (not the alpha channel) and delete it. Save it as tc_engl.tga and put it in the menu/video directory. PK3 it and test it out. It works best if you use photoshop, since you can anti-alias the text (and it looks MUCH better that way).

 

We did this for our ROTJ mod, and the text is almost consistent with the movie. Of course, we're doing a scratch SP mod so we have to do the text_crawl brush from scratch as well, but you get the general idea.

 

Also, the text_crawl shader just tells the engine which color to render the alpha channel text. It does nothing else. If it showed the text you suggested, it would not look right.

[MilesTeg]

some info for the background roq of the sw scrolling:

Only the starwars logo is roq. The file freezes the last frame and ends after the text fade out.

"jk0101_sw.roq" filename is bound to the scrolling text.

[War Master]

Um... Chrono_MOT, I did it this way and it looks and works perfectly. You're right, you probably don't have to make the text yellow. But my question is, if I did it wrong then how come it works?

[SuckyModderDave]

damn guys thanks a million. i was tearing my hair out trying to figger out how to do this. *reaches into pants, pulls something out* here, war master, i want you to have this. its my right testicle. i owe this to you. *places it in war masters hand, turns around and walks away*

[War Master]

You're welcome, SuckyModderDave. But you keep your right nut. I was withholding this info for a long time because I was being selfish and wanted to be the first to release a new text_crawl. But since someone beat me to it, I decided to give the info. You might need more help because I left out some detail. But this shader tutorial for making grates will help you to figure out how to make the shader. But don't do the code part because you're going to use Raven's.

 

http://fps.brainerd.net/paintshop5alpha.htm

[SuckyModderDave]

oh, i agree with you on the secret part. i emailed the guy who did the e3 scroll and he never replied. if i stumbled upon this i would be hesitant to relese it. But thanks a ton. I have no clue when ill finish my mod cuz im not sure if im going to attempt voice overs or anything. but it should be cool in a simplistic kinda way

[lassev]

Thanks a lot. I might mention I made a ROQ file containing my opening crawling text and it was bloody 10 Mb big with 512x256 resolution and lenght of 55 s, so it was really HUGE. Thanks again.

[War Master]

Originally posted by lassev

Thanks a lot. I might mention I made a ROQ file containing my opening crawling text and it was bloody 10 Mb big with 512x256 resolution and lenght of 55 s, so it was really HUGE. Thanks again.

 

Ouch!!! 10MB!!! I've heard of a bigger one though(22MB). When I was first trying to figure it out, I made a small sky box with stars and put my text on a no draw brush and moved it with a func_static. It didn't look too bad, you could see in between the letters and the text would fade out ok. A few more tweaks and it would have been acceptable in terms of look. It was also under 1 MB.

 

Doing it Raven's way, my text is well under half a MB and that's good when you submit your work to a site. You gotta have some sympathy for 56k users. My problem is I only have my demo text and my Paint Shop Pro trial has expired so I can't make a new one right now.

[lassev]

Yes, indeed. I did it the worst possible way in this particular situation. I used After Effects and it made 1650 targas to deal with. As I foolishly posted in the other thread, I was pretty sure it was the only way, even though I had found that alpha-only-picture with the original scrolling text. So, my problem was, from my perspective, how Raven had actually managed to get it so little in size with so good resolution. Well, at least I now have a tolerable Star Wars logo to start with. Yeah - it will be the true day of misery when you have nothing new to learn.

[War Master]

lassev, you don't need a star wars logo. You use the jk0101_sw video to supply the music, the logo and the overall presentation of the scrolling text. If you put your text in a directory, like I explained before, your text will be scrolling instead of Raven's. Just use the script I posted earlier to get it to work with your very own map.

 

I'm sure there's many ways to make the tga but if you make it my way you have to add color to your text. Make it a light yellow to match Raven's star wars logo. Don't forget to use anti_aliasing. I've only made it in Paint shop pro so I can't give any explanations for photoshop. If you have Paint Shop Pro then follow the tutorial for grates that I posted previously. It's basically the same concept because you want to be able to see the stars in between the letters.

[lassev]

Yeah, thanks for additional tips. Yet, I was only considering my own Star Wars logo in the case the star field behind the scrolling text could also be altered. Though I haven't had time to try to find out if that's possible. It would just be a bit more originality. Your info truly saved me from lot of problems. If you don't paint your text containing alpha picture black but white, it works better (the originals are also white). Well, that was the case with me anyway, and I think this is pretty much what Chono was saying with the deleting part (just a white picture with only alpha channel information).

[Magic_Al`s DF]

I tried making a scroll text in Photoshop and found that you don't need to add any yellow color. The original file opens as white text against transparency and the one I made the same way was automagically colored yellow when run in the game.

 

What I really want to contribute is a link to this page which is an essential reference to getting text crawls to look right:

http://www.theforce.net/theater/postproduction/Crawl/opening.html

 

The best method is to use a program that lets you work in layers (like Photoshop) and have one of the screengrabs from that page as the bottom layer while you type in the text from the screengrab word for word on the layer above. Tweak size, weight, spacing, and character width so it overlaps perfectly with the screengrab image, then delete the screengrab and change the text to your own words which of course will then look correct. Kudos to whoever went to the trouble of screengrabbing and de-perspectivizing the movie's text crawls for that page.

 

ITC Franklin Gothic is correct for everything assuming you have a complete selection of weights. The weights and widths described on that page are not all correct. Only the overlap-and-tweak method using a movie screengrab will yield accurate results.

 

Raven's textcrawl really doesn't look right at all. Not only is the typography wrong, their text is way too long and uses ALL CAPS way too much. Notice the screengrabs from the movies. Crawls are generally made of three paragraphs: the first paragraph is no more than two sentences long, and the second and third are one sentence each. Not counting the titles, ALL CAPS appear no more than once per crawl, and 2 out of 5 crawls don't use ALL CAPS at all.

 

I'd like to shorten the text, but I'm not sure how to adjust the speed of the crawl. In the movies, the last line of the crawl should be about half-way up the screen at the point in the music when the "hummable" part of the melody ends and there's that brassy flourish before the percussion comes in to march the crawl away. Raven's crawl speed is too fast because their text is too long.

[War Master]

Thanks Magic_Al`s DF, I'm going to try to make the shader Raven's way just for fun. I don't like Photoshop but I'll force myself to use it. What are screengrabs? I find Paint Shop Pro is much easier to use for typing in text. I'll try to make it in both programs.

[Magic_Al`s DF]

The screengrabs I was referring to are the images of the actual text crawls from the movies on theforce.net page that I linked to. Importing those into your graphics program would of course help make your text crawl look the most like the movies'. Raven was off their rocker on their font choices, IMO. Even the opening of Spaceballs looks more like Star Wars than what Raven did. Go figure, since the rest of the game is so lovingly detailed and more authentic than some of LucasArts' in-house work.

[Wudan]

Indeed, Raven's poor font choices are on my list of things to fix.