Feedback needed

[Quille]

I have made a program/utility, that should make it easier to "paint" your army in Dawn of War...
The program is called "Army Painter", and can be downloaded from my website:
http://www.quille.dk/dawn/?page=apps

It would be great to get some feedback on the program, so that I might improve it...
Would anyone please help me with that?

[stfas]

sorry but i don't see how this program called "army painter" will make it easier to paint in dawn of war, and there is already a army painter included in the dawn of war games...

[IBBoard]

I've not downloaded it, but the idea is reasonable. Basically it's more of a .teamcolour editor than an actual army painter. They are, after all, simple enough file types with a set number of values

One thing I would mention, though, is that it currently only seems to list the expansions up to DC but not SS. I don't know how many people use the functionality, but with a tiny bit of work you should be able to make it generic enough to support any army in the same way I did for the Pattern Switcher before Soulstorm was even released.

[Quille]

Yes! It is basically a .teamcolour editor. But if you took the time e to try the program, you would notice, that I have put a lot of features in it. For example the possibility, to save presets...
I won't, say that it is a much better "Army Painter", than the one in the games, but I think that, it is a lot easier, to select colors than in the game...

The reason, why I haven't implemented SS is, that I don't have it. I didn't know what the new races, is called, in the .teamcolour files, fx Space Marines is called: space_marine_race, and Eldar is called eldar_race. But what about Sisters of Battle and Dark Eldar?

Please try the program before you criticize it!

[IBBoard]

As I said, I didn't have Soulstorm when I implemented a feature that would let people add the Soulstorm races. It just takes a bit of planning and a configuration file and you can make it more usable. The other advantage is that the customisable "future-proofed for SS" version of the Pattern Switcher also allows people to use it for races in Mods as well, so it has more than one benefit to being customisable.

As I said, the idea of a .teamcolour editor is useful, especially if you don't want to run up a full Dawn of War. I've already done a similar thing (although somewhat basic) in the options section of the Texture Tool (third screenshot on [url=http://skins.hiveworldterra.co.uk/Downloads/detail_DawnOfWarTextureTool.html?version=1.8.1]this page). It allows you to pick the colours, badge and banner that you want to use when you compile a WTP in to a coloured TGA image. It won't let you edit the .teamcolour file itself, but it does import them.

The presets are reasonable, but I don't see too much difference to DoW with the Uber Painter mod or existing .teamcolour files. Your preset army colours are basically just .teamcolour files without the badge, banner and name, etc. Your preset colours are similar to what the army painter gives you already, or that the UberPainter extends to cover the entire paint range.

Overall it has its uses, but I think I would stick with the main Army Painter and Uber Painter. The addition of previews of the badge/banner and picking them by something other than "you need to know the file name" would also be a benefit. Perhaps a rename to "Team colour editor" may help as well.

[stfas]

im with IBBoard on this.

[Quille]

Thanks for the replies. I like the idea of making it more "dynamic" with the races...
The program has been made using the C# programming language. C# can't handle TARGA-pictures (.tga), so that is why, I haven't implemented a preview of badge and banner (believe me, I've thought of it...)

[IBBoard]

The Texture Tool is also written in C# and I got the badge and banner previews in there. That's why I suggested it One way is to add a large image conversion library that will probably double the size of the download (at least), but I just hand coded it as the TGA images it uses are quite simple.