User:Ghelæ/Guide To Battle Images

Many fiction pages are about wars, and these pages just aren't the same without images of the battles that they describe. This is a guide about how to make these images. Most people reading this should know a lot of it already, but I'll start at the simple parts anyway.

Obviously, you start by going into the Adventure Creator.

Basics


To make a good battle picture, you can't usually just place spaceships into a planet's sky and have them fire lasers at each other, with the "Laser Battle" Effect surrounding them. It just becomes a sea of identical green beams with occasional red and blue blasts coming out of nowhere and heading to nowhere in particular. It's nothing like how battles in Spore really look like, let alone the battles that you could be imagining. It would even be better to make your battle image in-game by zooming in to an in-game battle, which is an option if you do not have access to the full abilities Adventure Creator (and even if you do).

This is a very simple image, with three spaceships in a skirmish over a planet. First of all, the most important feature of these battles: the ships. They are made from disguised Gates which are lifted into the sky, resized, and rotated into the right positions. It's that simple.

Secondly, I'll point out that planets in Spore are far, far smaller than in real life. To make these battles look realistic, either modify the terrain to make it all seem to be flat (hiding the horizon with hills works well here) or make the battle at a high altitude - just in or above the planet's atmosphere. For the latter, make sure that there are no visible plants, buildings, vehicles (or, really, anything else) on the ground.

The third option, which is often the best, is to flatten the terrain. Then, make your battle scene. Once you've finished this, colour the ground black and remove all of the atmosphere. Then you have a battle in deep space.

Weapon Effects
Finally, we get to the most important part - the weapons. After all, it wouldn't be much of a battle if the ships just flew around each other. The main weapons to use and the Effects that are best at making them are as follows:


 * Missiles: Spotlights
 * It doesn't really matter what colour spotlights are used. I've traditionally used white for primitive missiles (missiles in a battle taking place a long time in the past, or missiles being used by pirates); yellow for antimatter weapons; and purple for Grox-fired missiles.
 * For weak missiles, the "Running Lights" effect seems to work well, as seen in this image being fired by a pirate ship.
 * Pulses: Lights (e.g Light White and Light Red)
 * Blasters being fired in the vacuum of space could also look like this.
 * These can also be used for missiles that do not have any visible trail.
 * Beam weapons: Links
 * "Electrical Link" makes an electrolaser effect, "Magic Link" looks like a stream of plasma, "Fire Link" looks like a flamethrower, and "Pollution Link"... doesn't really look like anything.
 * However, when the link effect is being generated (the best way to get to this point is to zoom out far enough so that it disappears, pause the game, zoom back in again, and then quickly unpause then pause the game until you get it right), if it is placed with one end at the end of a gun barrel and the other end elsewhere, then all of them (except for the "Fire Link", which in this case is the worthless one) will look like some kind of pulse or blaster weapon.
 * Real laser weapons from air vehicles and spaceships can also be used well, but I'll explain all about that later.

There are, of course, many other ways of using Effects that people have discovered, such as using the spotlights as particle weapons being fired at close range, and using "Running Lights" as a barrage of weapons fire from an entire fleet of ships.

Other Effects may also be used. "Marquee" can look like a trail of pulses, and even "Machine Gun Fire" (and, by extention, "Machine Gun Impact") has its uses, such as being small projectiles or blaster bolts.

Impacts
When weapons hit a spaceship, the impact can best be shown in a few ways:


 * "Light Red" makes a sort of firey, glowing effect, without lots of obvious flames which wouldn't appear when going at high speed or in the depths of space.
 * "Fire Camp" and "Fire Blaze" work best on damaged parts of large, slow-moving capital ships in an atmosphere. "Fire Camp" can be rotated to an angle where the flames appear to be going in a particular direction, which can be used to make it appear as though a fast-moving ship is going in the opposite direction and the flames are trailing behind.
 * "Static Storm" looks like it could be the impact from an electric or ion-based weapon, so (for example) it could be used as the impact from an "Electrical Link" electrolaser. "Broken Machinery" can also work here.

Image 2: "Laser Battle" Effect


"Laser Battle" is an unpredictable Effect, with random red and blue blaster bolts appearing out of opposite ends of a battlefield and racing across to the other side. The bolts don't necessarily travel in the same end-to-end direction, and sometimes just fly side-to-side or in diagonals. They don't even stick to the same altitude, sometimes flying a little higher or a little lower, which makes all the difference when the effect stretches over a battlespace and you want to make sure that it looks like the blasters are being fired in the direction of enemy ships rather than in random directions. Unfortunately, the blaster bolts are being fired in random directions.

So, how do you get around this?

The best ways are:
 * Don't show all of the battle - make it look like there are ships on both sides that are out of view when you take the picture, so some of the stray bolts look like they are coming from a ship that can't be seen and flying towards another ship that, convieniently, can't be seen. The image above is not a good example of this, although at least there appear to be some Grox ships outside the field of view.
 * Fill the entire scene with ships. It may not sound good, but it works. Well, as long as you don't overdo it.

Also, remember to rotate and resize the "Laser Battle" so that the bolts are of a realistic size. Adding multiple copies of the Effect, all positioned at different angles, can also help make the battle look better.

This would all be so much more easier if we had something like the "Machine Gun Fire" Effect which shot plasma instead of bullets... for the record, "Machine Gun Fire" can be used to make anti-starfighter flak guns fired by large capital ships and ground-based turrets, although it can also be used for rapid-fire blaster weapons in certain circumstances (i.e. if you think it looks right).

Image 3: And finally, some real weapons


Some lasers don't look right as beams of flickery sparkles, and some missiles shouldn't really be portrayed by indiscrete balls of light with tails. But, vehicles just fire their weapons from random guns (or, if they don't have guns, from the centre of their body). And, as mentioned earlier, air vehicles firing lasers are all basically at the same altitude and angle. These will usually make your battle scene picture look worse.

The best fix for this is to make sure that the vehicles aren't seen. For this, you'll need to make prop vehicles - simple vehicles that are basically a hull and a weapon (or just a hull - but remember, either way, it will need to have three parts before you can save it). You could make four aircraft to fire the four types of Laser, and a ground or sea vehicle to fire Missiles.

To make sure that there is something for the vehicles to fire their weapons at, you'll also need to make another prop - a small building works best, as it can be placed inside a Gate (which is what most of your visible spaceships will be made of). The ability to place it precisely also means that you can decide exactly where the weapon is aimed at, although this is only particularly useful for lasers since missiles do not typically fly in a straight line. For the same reason, lasers are really the most useful of the two weapons for most scenes.

Remember:
 * Set the prop's health to as high as it wil go (but not to infinite) so that it won't be destroyed before you've managed to take the picture.
 * Set the prop and the prop vehicles on two different teams, so that the vehicles fire at the props.

Combining lasers with the ability to precisely direct the weapons fire means that spaceship-mounted guns can easily appear to fire particle weapons. Remember that lasers have two ends - the end that is coming from the gun and the end that is hitting something. In the picture above, the barrels of the spaceship's turbolaser turrets contain the props that the lasers are being fired at, and the aircraft that are firing the lasers are out of view. The spaceship is angled so the beams are travelling parallel to the barrels. This means that the each of the laser beams has one end in the gun and one end out of view, which makes it look like the beams are being fired from the guns and not from elsewhere towards the guns.

A note on the four types of lasers: the green and orange lasers, being plain beams, look more like particle beam weapons than the other two. The yellow lasers can be placed in the background where they look like rapid-fire blasters. The purple lasers do not give such a simple effect, and should only be used if there is a specific reason to use that sort of beam.

Last but not least, actually taking the pictures
Once you've made your battle scene, there's one final important thing to do: get the picture you want. This process has a few steps:


 * First of all, in the Adventure Creator, place the Captain into a position close to the battle but not so that it will obscure any of the scene. It will also help to rotate the Captain so that it is looking in the direction that you'll want to be when you're taking the screenshot. This is because the freecam mode (which you'll activate in a few steps time) can be quite glitchy when you've moved around a lot with it, particularly after zooming out a long way and rotating.
 * Secondly, go into Test Drive mode and pause the game. Pausing it is important, especially if you're using real weapons because there tends to be a permanent shroud of smoke over anything that's gained battle damage for more than a few seconds. Keep the game unpaused for a couple of seconds, though, until the coloured boxes from the Adventure Creator that denote teams have faded away.
 * Thirdly, use Ctrl-Alt-C to activate freecam mode, which allows you to move the camera away from the Captain.
 * Then move the camera into the position you want it to be in, so that when you take the screenshot you'll have the picture you want. Don't worry too much about lighting or extra things that you don't want in the picture, because you can easily crop the image and change the brightness/contrast/colour saturation using photo-editing software later.
 * Unpause the game for a short time, and then pause it when you think your scene looks perfect (or as close to perfect as you'll ever get). This is especially important when using Effects such as "Laser Battle", as you'll want all of the blaster bolts to be in the right positions (but again, in some scenes, you can edit some of the bolts out later).
 * Take the picture with the "C" button on your keyboard, or the little camera icon on the bar on the bottom of the screen. Using the keyboard carries less risk of accidentally moving the camera's location, though. You should be able to find the picture (basically, in "My Documents\My Spore Creations\Pictures" for Windows, and probably in similar locations for other operating systems). There you can rename it, edit it, etc, ready for uploading it to SporeWiki via Special:Upload.

And there you go!