`/paint-pipes`

[nova fjord]

I could feel my eyes opening

[fallen sphinx]

Thats incredible

Selection tool to do this in a specific area? :)

[grand ruin]

Yeah that’s a nice idea I can add a selection tool, and I think even make reverse-select turn the pipes back to unpainted ones

[nova fjord]

1. Why do you even need bots? Can't you just color the pipes?
2. Are you using an entity per color or an entity that supports-color?

[fallen sphinx]

pipes have no runtime tinting

so it needs to be different pipe items / entities

tho with such an auto coloring tool I guess you could remove the items/recipes and have the colored pipe entities return regular pipes when mined

so its purely visual

[nova fjord]

I mean, it may be a colorable entity (like loco, car, train-stop or turret) or five entities for five colors (pipe-red, pipe-green, pipe-blue)

[fallen sphinx]

its still a pipe? cant be a car if it has to behave like a pipe

[fallen sphinx]

I don't see where pipes fit into any of "character, rolling stock, car, spider-vehicle, flying text, corpse or simple-entitiy-with-owner"

[nova fjord]

You may make a colorable somple-entity-with-owner pipe-overlay and place it over the pipe

[fallen sphinx]

so you turn every single pipe into a composed entity? that you need to keep track of with runtime scripting?

1000s of them

[nova fjord]

No, why?
It runs once when you select

[fallen sphinx]

you double the entity count in the map and need to register every single pipe you color for the destroyed event to handle it

[nova fjord]

So, just register a global destroy event, no?

double the entity count is totally not a problem

[fallen sphinx]

the biggest problem with another entity over the top is that you need to handle all the different pipe connection variations yourself I think

where are the windowed pipes, T-section, L-section, X-section, straight, end pipe, ...

all dependent on entities that are placed around you and their orientation

[nova fjord]

Oof

[fallen sphinx]

you'd need to track placement of every possible entity that has a fluid box

aswell as rotations (is that even possible?)

[forest elm]

neat

[forest spoke]

@grand ruin what tools did you use to resking the sprites? They really look neat and stand out a lot! 🙂

[tame sinew]

The fluids in them do though?

Like, you can very clearly see the different colors in the pipe window

[fallen sphinx]

those are based on fluid prototype colors

and only the flow animation gets tinted from that

[grand ruin]

Thank you :) I brought the base game files into photoshop and made a bunch of clipping mask layers for each color, and then exported each layer. Eventually I grew weary and wrote a little script to do the exporting automatically for me

[tame sinew]

But you could hijack the flow animation to cover the entire thing if you wanted is my point

[grand ruin]

At it's core the mod is trying to be pretty simple, it just adds a bunch of copies of the base pipe in colorful variants. Same recipe, reach distance, health etc. All intended to be manually built. Basically just more pipe colors for the player to choose from

[tame sinew]

It wouldn’t work for empty pipes but it wouldn’t need separate prototypes

[fallen sphinx]

maybe you could make that work hmm

it does get stretched around tho

so that would break it I think

[grand ruin]

I originally wrote this little paint-pipes script because I wanted to make the pipes in the main menu simulations colorful, but it was fun to play with so I added it as a usable command too :)

[nova fjord]

Is it possible to do this with builtin tint?

[grand ruin]

One perk of manually creating the photoshop files is that I could keep the unpainted metal color for the couplings and edges of the pipes. It doesn't make a ton of sense if you think about it too hard, but I like how it looks so maybe just don't think about it 🙃

[fallen sphinx]

is each of this a separate sprite or 1 tint layer for all of them and then just using the engines tinting functionality?

[nova fjord]

That does make a lot of sence actually, and that's why you may make layers in sprites
One tinted layer and one untinted layer
If that's how that works

[grand ruin]

So I made each sprite into a photoshop file with two layers, the base layer, and a mask layer. and then I pasted all the color adjustment layers and turned them into a clipping mask. And then I go one-by-one and make each clipping mask visible, export a png, make it not visible, and move to the next color

I think maybe I could try exporting just the mask layer and add it to the prototype as a layer with a script-defined tint color, but I've already done it this way and like the result so idk

[grand ruin]

each color has its own premade sprites. in data-updates it's a direct 1:1 swap of the old filenames with my colored version filenames

[fallen sphinx]

the benefit of having the tint layer and using engine tint would be automatic mod support for more fluids

if colors were determined by fluid

[grand ruin]

That could either be very nice or super overwhelming if a mod adds tons of types of fluids 😅

[fallen sphinx]

you'd not want individual pipe entities you place yourself in that regard 😅

and more like a pipe visualizer type thing that auto colors your pipes once

[fallen sphinx]

.

[grand ruin]

it's a good idea! I'll make a new branch and play around with it

[untold burrow]

would love this, the idea of this mod is super neat but i dont want to deal with a bunch of different color pipes in the inventory

[tame sinew]

They should all be hidden just fine

[nova fjord]

They have item-to-place=regular-pipe and mine-result=regilar-pipe
So you can't place them by hand but they work just fine

[fallen sphinx]

the current ones don't

[nova fjord]

Hmm