Ioun Stones Options

[SimDing0]

A few thoughts on the ioun stone animations.

1) The height at which the animation floats is optimized for taller characters, which means it floats too high above the heads of dwarves, gnomes and halflings. Similarly, it'll be in the wrong place for polymorphed characters. I ran into the same problem. Racial height differences can be addressed with EFFs, obviously, but the polymorph issue's more awkward, I suspect.
2) The yellowish animation for the golden stone leaves rather a distinct trail. It could possibly do with a little more transparency or translucency. (This actually applies to most of the trails, I think, but this one most specifically.)
3) I've noticed the animation disappearing on occasion, but I can't recreate it or pin down what causes it. Will report back if I find out.
4) Any chance of a WeiDU version and mod support? I'd like to remove the ioun stone component from my mod, because yours are way better, but I can't do that until there's a WeiDU package. I'm willing to code it up if you're interested, along with support for ioun stones added by mods, and I can either replace the component in my mod or give you a standalone package to host here. (Or both.)

This post has been edited by SimDing0: Jun 23 2005, 02:10 PM

[Galactygon]

Racial height differences can be addressed with EFFs, obviously, but the polymorph issue's more awkward, I suspect.

According to the Polymorph spell description, equipment melds into the new form of the caster, so there shouldn't be any animation playing when polymorphed.

2) The yellowish animation for the golden stone leaves rather a distinct trail. It could possibly do with a little more transparency or translucency. (This actually applies to most of the trails, I think, but this one most specifically.)

There is a good frame-by-frame method I have found in Photoshop that can do what you asked; it could turn quite tedius if you have a lot of frames.

You simply copy the first frame to the clipboard, and paste it twice in a photoshop file right on top of each other. Now you have 2 layers of the same image right on top of each other (in addition to a background layer). Then, change the blend mode of the top image to "multiply". It should make all the areas darker, except for the bright areas (I haven't uncovered what non-linear formula is used to achieve those effects yet). After that, you merge all of your layers together (or press Ctr + E multiple times).

Apply this method to all of the frames, and when you are done, use BAM workshop II to open the original file and convert the animation to "unpalletted" so you could paste your frames into the sequence without them changing into different colours. Then convert the BAM back to "palletted", and save it. Since the transparent colour is also changed in photoshop, will have to open BAM workshop to manually fill in the transparent colours.

-Galactygon