Extracting U7 item pics

[dino]

Yesterday I secretly started to work on a nice little info section about U7 for my site.
It's no longer secret now. :p

Anyway, I'm trying to collect all sorts of stuff related to Black Gate, from portraits to books and scrolls, etc. So far I've even made a search script for keys (because there are so many keys that you sometimes can't figure out what certain ones are or what they do).

I'll also be depending heavily on pictures of U7 stuff including items, portraits, and that sort of thing. Thanks to Exult Studio, I've already extracted all the ~279 portraits.

However, I can't find pictures of the U7 items with Exult Studio, meaning that I can't extract them and have to resort to taking screenshots from the game and editing them to make them presentable. Is there a way of extracting pictures of the items?

[Kyle Sullivan]

Yes, just go to

http://www.bootstrike.com/Ultima7bg/mapedit.html

thre is a shapes viewer there (for DOS I think) that allows you to save the pictures directly from the shapes viewer.

cheers,

kyle

[Dominus]

how can you not find u7 items with ES. Just browse the shapes. Just mind that you need to look at all the frames. But you can use the 'frames' option when you browse (so all the frames are next to each other)
see this picture

[dino]

Thanks both.

I found the items with ES, now that I looked again. Maybe I didn't look hard enough. I haven't used Exult Studio more than twice before anyway, so I'm not used to it.

Next question, if you don't mind: is there a way of enlarging the pictures? I mean, in the game the items look a little bigger...

By the way, if I double-click the items, I can see their damage, flags, etc. I imagine that's exactly their damage et cetera in the actual game, right? That'll be really useful when making the items section!

[Dominus]

well, the items in the game don't look bigger. Only when you are using scalers
And no there is no way to make it bigger.

The damage should be correct.

[dino]

Compare the magebane in this in-game screenshot with the magebane in this screenshot of Exult Studio.

The one in the game is clearly larger.

I have no idea if I'm using scalers. I don't even know what they are - I'm not too technical myself.

[drcode]

For quite a while, until about a month ago, the 'Find' feature in the window was broken.

I agree that it would be nice to see the shapes scaled in ES.

[Dominus]

Hey dino: RTFM
http://exult.info/docs.php#Video should give you an idea of what scaling does.

[dino]

DOH, I never RTFM. :p

Interesting though.

Can't ES items be scaled the same way though?

[Andrea B Previtera]

I don't know how does it fit here, but I've got all the shapes extracted in a single big zip file:
http://www.lalista.org/ashes/allshapes.zip
Enjoy. (??)

[drcode]

ES could show the shape scaled if someone goes to the work of supporting it:-)

Also, note that if you right-click on a shape, you can export it as a .png file. You might want to click the "Frames" button to see all the possible frames.

[dino]

>>I don't know how does it fit here, but I've got all the shapes extracted in a
>>single big zip file:

Wow, nearly 8 megs zipped.
I've already extracted practically all the shapes I need, so thanks anyway.

>note that if you right-click on a shape, you can export it as a .png file. You
>might want to click the "Frames" button to see all the possible frames.

Oh, I've done that, and I praise you guys who made ExultStudio for it. In an hour I managed to extract 279 portraits (took that long because I exported them one by one) complete with transparency around the portrait's border. It would have taken me weeks to extract them in that state from the game.

THANKS!

--

On another note...

I've mentioned above that I'm working on a U7 section for my site. One small part of it is a key database, where you can search for the key you want depending on where it is located, what key frame it is, what kind of thing it opens, and where its target is located. I still can't figure out what the key at the Guardian's X does... anyone can tell me?

[Dominus]

on extracting the portraits and other shapes:
you could have used our tools and the gimp plugin to
1. expack the shapes from the flexes
2. load the shapes into Gimp and convert there.

Alternatively you could have used the photoshop plugin (works well with Paint Shop Pro) but that is limited to single frame shapes.

The Gimp is an open-source graphics editor program that you can download pre-compiled for windows.

[Crowley]

The key at the X fits the chest in Serpent's Hold meeting room. It only contains some reagents.

[dino]

Dominus: thanks for the info. I don't really know about Gimp and that stuff, that's why I haven't used it.

By the way, any idea when the next 'official' Exult release will be? For some reason, I'd rather upgrade with an official release than a snapshot if possible.

Crowley: Yes, it fits! Thanks!!

[drcode]

Thanks for reminding us:-) It was supposed to be a few weeks ago.