Winplan VCR Pictures: wpvcr.dll
The ships as used in Winplan's Video Combat Recorder (VCR) are stored in a file called wpvcr.dll. Thanks to a program once written by a guy called 'Dave' I've been able to replace some of those pictures. Dave's program was something like pre-beta, and very buggy. Akseli Mäki has written a much better program to replace those pictures.
Thanks to Akseli's very nice program and Kenneth Wisseman's excellent artwork for VGA Planets V4 I have now been able to put together a dll file with great new pictures for Winplan's VCR. The pictures in this dll file are also used in the starbase display to show which ship a base is building (the picture in the lower left displaying which ship is set as build-order).
Examples (Winplan screenshots):
- VCR: A Nova fighting a Gorbie
- Starbase screen: A detail of a starbase set to build a Kittyhawk
Download the latest version (21-06-2002), zipped down to 270 Kb here. Simply unzip it into your main winplan directory and enjoy. You might want to save a backup of the original wpvcr.dll in case you somehow turn out not to like better, colorful pictures.
Future plans?
Some pictures probably
still need some 'cleaning up'. When the black around the ship is not absolutely
100% black it turns red when the ship is hit in the VCR. Look closely and you'll
find some ships where not only the ship but also some of the pixels in space
around it turn red. I might get around to fixing this sometime, but that would
be something for the future. I might also look into
resizing some of the ships in the future. Currently all ships have the same
size (as large as possible), effectively making a probe as large as a cube in battle.
This leads to some strange battles - a probe is displayed larger than a Virgo
for example, and the Instrumentality is displayed much larger than the Golem. Ofcourse the bigger the clearer, but it doesn't quite look right. But then again
if I size the probe down to the proper relative poportions, it should not be
larger than a mere pixel. Something to look into...