I'm thinking about how to make the 3rd kits work with Kitserver. This is about player kits only, because goalkeeper kits don't use shared palette, and therefore - no problem there. So with player kits, there are basically 2 approaches we could take:
#1. Every time you add a kit to your collection of player kits for a team, you need to rebuild all of the kits for this team. This is definitely something that needs to be automated. There would need to be a manager tool for KDB (like kdbManager was for PES4/WE8i) that would take care of that. So, you would just add a new kit to collection using that tool, and it will offer you to recalculate the palette. This, i think, would be intuitive enough for most people. The disadvantage of this approach is that more different color kits you have for one team - harder it becomes to maintain the same visual quality of each kit, because they all must share the same palette of 256 colors (255 actually, because first one needs to be fully transparent). Another potential difficulty is the good color reduction algorithm. OPTPix ImageStudio does a very good job in that, so at least we know it's possible
. But to write our own may not be a trivial task.
#2. We could hijack the shared palette approach by basically creating explicit combinations of kits, and then when you try to make combos in game (by pressing "O" button to "Change Setup" in kit selection screen), the kitserver will only allow such combinations to be chosen that actually exists as PNG/BMP files. Advantage here is that you can grow the number of kits without worrying about degradation in visual quality, because those kits will NOT be using shared palette, but instead each one will have its own. Also, when you add a new kit, you don't need to rebuild all of your existing kits, because of same reason. Disadvantage is that user will have to create images for every combination he/she wants. For instance, if you want a 3rd (champions league) shirt, away shorts, and home socks - you will need to make a PNG(BMP) image with this combination. (Of course, there are talented kitmakers amongst us, who will make all those combos for other people to use )
What do you think, people?
I'm interested to hear opinions from everybody: "professional" kitmakers, "amateur" kitmakers who may decide to paint or kit or two just for the joy of editing, and also people who just want to easily use the kits, without worrying about how it all works inside
I can't say Konami made it more difficult this time around - they just made it different. The "Change setup" feature i think is a good addition. 3rd kits are still possible, but we need to think how we want to do them, and choose an approach that makes sense. If somebody can think of alternatives to the 2 scenarios above - please share your thoughts.
#1. Every time you add a kit to your collection of player kits for a team, you need to rebuild all of the kits for this team. This is definitely something that needs to be automated. There would need to be a manager tool for KDB (like kdbManager was for PES4/WE8i) that would take care of that. So, you would just add a new kit to collection using that tool, and it will offer you to recalculate the palette. This, i think, would be intuitive enough for most people. The disadvantage of this approach is that more different color kits you have for one team - harder it becomes to maintain the same visual quality of each kit, because they all must share the same palette of 256 colors (255 actually, because first one needs to be fully transparent). Another potential difficulty is the good color reduction algorithm. OPTPix ImageStudio does a very good job in that, so at least we know it's possible
. But to write our own may not be a trivial task.#2. We could hijack the shared palette approach by basically creating explicit combinations of kits, and then when you try to make combos in game (by pressing "O" button to "Change Setup" in kit selection screen), the kitserver will only allow such combinations to be chosen that actually exists as PNG/BMP files. Advantage here is that you can grow the number of kits without worrying about degradation in visual quality, because those kits will NOT be using shared palette, but instead each one will have its own. Also, when you add a new kit, you don't need to rebuild all of your existing kits, because of same reason. Disadvantage is that user will have to create images for every combination he/she wants. For instance, if you want a 3rd (champions league) shirt, away shorts, and home socks - you will need to make a PNG(BMP) image with this combination. (Of course, there are talented kitmakers amongst us, who will make all those combos for other people to use
)What do you think, people?
I'm interested to hear opinions from everybody: "professional" kitmakers, "amateur" kitmakers who may decide to paint or kit or two just for the joy of editing, and also people who just want to easily use the kits, without worrying about how it all works inside
I can't say Konami made it more difficult this time around - they just made it different. The "Change setup" feature i think is a good addition. 3rd kits are still possible, but we need to think how we want to do them, and choose an approach that makes sense. If somebody can think of alternatives to the 2 scenarios above - please share your thoughts.
