Sounds great!
If you want to do artwork for OP2, here are some areas we could do:
Background of the menus screen (the starship one)
Edge on the dialog boxes
Buttons, radio buttons, check boxes, etc
Background of the dialogs (if you look closely it's a faint diagram of something)
If you're *really* ambitious:
The gray frame of the in-game window
Any cursors
Load and Save screens
How to extract/modify the artwork:
Get a resource editor (a good one is ResHacker -- search on google for it) and open these files:
op2shres.dll -- most of the menus, etc type stuff are in here
out2res.dll and Outpost2.exe -- in game stuff is in these
Edit the bitmaps in there. You would be wisest to extract them, edit them in your graphics program, then replace them in the file.
Make SURE that when you save, you don't overwrite your old files (make a copy first) if you're planning to test (as I'm sure you would)
Changing graphics WILL alter the checksum, so you can't play multi with your changed graphics. (Another reason to keep backups)
If you fail to back up, you CAN'T get the originals back by replacing the original graphics back. (It will look 'original' in the game but there are slight changes an editor does that can't be reversed, so the checksum is altered)
Regarding icons: there are a few non animated icons in these files. However, most of the icons are .ani files in the op2 folder. You can edit these as much as you want, and it won't affect the checksum when you play.
If you have really nice looking graphics, submit them to us and we might put the best ones into the next update!
-- op2hacker
