Mod Suggestion: Billboards of CoH/CoV

[Herotu]

Billboards offer the opportunity to create a lot of fancypants artwork.

 

We could even have rotating billboards (I mean people could generate new art each ... week, for example - not that the billboard itself rotates).

Hey here's one: Advertise

• Upcoming Costume Competitions,
• Tanker Tuesdays, other events,
• Base Design Competition!
• Advertise your Supergroup!

Ofc, these designs should have dates on their names so people don't download old ones (or out-of-date ones could be removed from the mod site).

There's loads of scope for interesting adverts! Where are our artists?

 

What do you think of THAT eh?! Well?! WHAAAAATTTTT? Tell everybody in the oblong box below.
 

[WanderingAries]

My instinct is to say that this is a Server-Side item, but I may be wrong.

[AboveTheChemist]

As I noted in a previous billboards thread, 1-for-1 replacement of in-game billboard textures with custom billboards should be feasible, and my offer to provide the technical knowledge to make a mod like this happen still stands, if someone can supply the art.

[Herotu]

26 minutes ago, AboveTheChemist said:

As I noted in a previous billboards thread, 1-for-1 replacement of in-game billboard textures with custom billboards should be feasible, and my offer to provide the technical knowledge to make a mod like this happen still stands, if someone can supply the art.

I don't want to stereotype... who am I kidding? I LOVE to stereotype.

 

All artists are incredibly lazy. FACT!

If we want them to do anything, I suspect we'll have to prod and poke them all the way to the finish line.

[Herotu]

With that in mind, what do the artists need to know in terms of contraints?

 

Resolution/DPI etc? 

I guess I can just find the files myself..

[AboveTheChemist]

The primary constraints are image size (width and height) and image format. These would theoretically be 1-for-1 replacements for existing billboards. So, the artist would need to decide which in-game billboard they wanted to replace, and then create an image with the exact same dimensions.

 

For vidiotmaps, I use BMP files that are then converted to textures, uncompressed. Game world textures can probably use any of the main image types (BMP, PNG, JPG, maybe others) which will then be converted to a compressed texture. I don't know for sure if the base texture has to be of a specific image type, but if it gets that far I can find out. Offhand I'd say stick with BMP or PNG to be safe.

[Oubliette_Red]

I happen to have a copy of Leandro's Splasher that still works for my needs, for other players it no longer works and I could not tell you why. It has the ability to change in-game billboards/movie posters/graffiti/etc. for users at least. I've never tried changing billboards myself but it does list dimensions for each categorized by ratio of billboards/movie posters/graffiti/etc. I took a screenshot of each category hoping it might help here.

 

 

Not sure how legible it is here for others, but it's link to the original that can be downloaded.

 

Edited July 18, 2023 by Oubliette_Red

[Herotu]

Ooh I didn't know about that!
https://cohsplasher.blogspot.com/2007/08/basic-questions.html

[Greycat]

Hmm. Didn't the old live forums have a contest for billboards and stores at one point, too? I don't recall when, though.. given (a) the wayback machine and (b) the copy of the old ones someone has floating around, I'm sure the info's in there, too... at least what they requested for us.

 

THAT SAID... talking about it as a mod would mean only you'd see them, if you're replacing textures. With mention of costume contests, SG advertisements, etc (which themselves would be server specific,) something woul dneed to be submitted, approved and put in serverside, I'm pretty sure.

[Techwright]

On 7/17/2023 at 11:45 PM, Greycat said:

Hmm. Didn't the old live forums have a contest for billboards and stores at one point, too? I don't recall when, though.. given (a) the wayback machine and (b) the copy of the old ones someone has floating around, I'm sure the info's in there, too... at least what they requested for us.

 

THAT SAID... talking about it as a mod would mean only you'd see them, if you're replacing textures. With mention of costume contests, SG advertisements, etc (which themselves would be server specific,) something woul dneed to be submitted, approved and put in serverside, I'm pretty sure.

 

I believe they had something like this for the theater posters.  And those were universally changed, not just server changes.  So, at least at one point in the OG, the tools existed for changes.

 

Clientside billboard mods shouldn't need to be approved, but then, some folks post videos.  Is there a disclaimer if something appears on one of them that may be problematic?

[Greycat]

56 minutes ago, Techwright said:

 

I believe they had something like this for the theater posters.  And those were universally changed, not just server changes.  So, at least at one point in the OG, the tools existed for changes.

 

Clientside billboard mods shouldn't need to be approved, but then, some folks post videos.  Is there a disclaimer if something appears on one of them that may be problematic?

 

Well, clientside mods would go in whether the devs know of them or not. If it's simply "Put your own image(s) here at ###x### resolution," there's no way they'd be able to control anything - they can't be approved (even, necessarily, of the mod itself, short of changing things in the game to break them deliberately - and universally.) One person could put up movie posters, another could put up centerfolds, and they'd be the only ones to see it.

 

When things like SG recruiting, contests, etc. were mentioned, that's something that would have to go serverside to be of any use, so everyone could see it - which brings its own issues, as SG "The Super Sewer Sweepers" may not exist on every server, so seeing that on (say) Indom when it's not there, well...

[BurtHutt]

This reminds me when the Live Devs tried to put ads in the game. This is when the game was in the downturn and needed an influx of money. The most memorable part of that was how many players were going nuts about having real ads take the place of fake ads! They had/have to be some of the most moronic players I'd ever come across. Seriously.

 

Now that I've derailed the OP, I think it'd be cool to see something done with the billboards and so on. However, I don't want to see Dev resources allocated to that. They are a small but mighty team and this is not near the top of my list on things I'd like to see in the game.

 

Yes, true believers, my #1 wish remains the desire to have a Dev controlled AE where players can make missions and the acceptable missions can be dragged and dropped into the Dev controlled AE contacts (which would be canon etc). I have a dream...

[mechahamham]

On 7/15/2023 at 5:23 PM, AboveTheChemist said:

As I noted in a previous billboards thread, 1-for-1 replacement of in-game billboard textures with custom billboards should be feasible, and my offer to provide the technical knowledge to make a mod like this happen still stands, if someone can supply the art.

 

So, how much work are we talking here for rotating ? Just replacing images one time, like many folks do for vidiotmaps or texture replacements seems nominal, but wouldn't we have to have an updater or something similar for rotating images? Can CoH modder handle regular rotations like this?

 

I can think of a couple ways to do this with shell scripting, but they all involve intervening in the CoH launch process. I dunno how extendable CoH modder would be for something like this.

 

The actual creation of regularly changing images wouldn't be that difficult and updating them would require only very minimal supervision. A typical process is that an artist creates one PSD or XCF file that contains layers of background art and text and can then export it in whatever format is needed, like BMP or PNG. In the example of the ads for regular costume contests, you'd have the same art for a few weeks and then a changing date in the text. This can even be automated fairly easily, so long as the artist or event organizer checks the output before uploading the new version.

 

"4:00 PM EST on 08-09-20X3 - This week's theme is 'Starving Creator'!

[AboveTheChemist]

9 hours ago, mechahamham said:

So, how much work are we talking here for rotating ? Just replacing images one time, like many folks do for vidiotmaps or texture replacements seems nominal, but wouldn't we have to have an updater or something similar for rotating images? Can CoH modder handle regular rotations like this?

 

As little work as possible, ideally! In all seriousness, I have no idea how much work it would entail on the art end. On my end, I already have a system set up for updating vidiotmaps. I imagine I could probably adapt that system for billboards fairly easily, or pass that along to someone who would take over the Image > Texture > Mod Process (which would be my preference, I have enough mods to keep me busy as is). Then it would be a matter of adding the new billboard images to the collection, running a few scripts/batch files to process those images into game textures, then uploading that as a mod to the City Mod Installer (CoH Modder is dead).

 

I don't think that would be too obnoxious a process as long as the rotations weren't too frequent, maybe twice or at most 4 times a year, and City Mod Installer should work fine for that. It partly depends on the content of the new billboards. I think a bunch of supergroup and costume contest ads are far less interesting than ads that are original and totally fictitious (like the Clanket ad), and I think the latter would drum up more interest. The more demand there is for the mod, the more motivation the modders have to produce the supply, in my opinion at least.