Glowskins troubles

[Zero Angel]

I've been working on editing some of my glowskins and am having problems in-game with them.

Basically I take some of my old softimage PIC files, convert them to PNG (for editing), make the necessary edits, and then run BZ2DXTGen. This causes the textures to become completely white. Since they are glowskins, they are 32-bit images with an alpha channel.

I had a similar problem when trying to convert a building glowskin before. The part which used alpha was totally white.

Any one know any good work arounds?

[MrTwosheds]

Don't use png. glowskins use alpha channels (mask) to determine what gets drawn and what does not, png use's a slightly different system for producing transparency, it does not work well with glowskins as it does not use an alpha channel.
.pic or .tga (better) should work fine.
.png is excellent for normal transparent textures, such as leaves or other effects, but glowskins need an alpha channel.

[Zero Angel]

Okay. I've used XnView to convert the source texture from PIC -> TGA, then edited it in the GIMP and ran BZ2DXTGen on the edited files. However buildings and units which deploy into buildings still have white textures.

Either the GIMP or XnView must mangle the alpha channel, converting it into a form that the unit skins are tolerant of but the buildings are not.

[Ded10c]

When making new ones, I used IrfanView to convert from source (generally .pic) to .png, edited with GIMP, then used XNView to change them back into .pic (as IrfanView will only facilitate loading .pic, not saving). Worked fine for me.

[MrTwosheds]

I use photoshop and I have not come across that problem with buildings.

[General BlackDragon]

Why are you converting out of pic anyway?

Just convert the .pic into DXT

[Zero Angel]

I cannot edit pic directly with the current software I have, however I will just have to get some new software that can handle pic. It's not a big deal.

[jaydenbz2]

3d exploration can open pic's with alpha channel, I do this all the time, trust me.Just save them as a .tga out of 3dex and you're right.

[Cyber]

Problem solved.

I added his Glowskins to my new isdf-skins, which will come soon.

The problem was of course, that the .tga-files seem to have poorer quality, like a .bmp file.
Dxtgen couldnt convert .pic-files so I just saved the textures as .jpeg and they were working fine

[GSH]

That's backwards. .tga and .bmp are lossless file formats. Open, edit, save, as many times as you won't, and you won't lose data. .jpg is a lossy file format. Open, edit, save, and it'll lose data over time, like a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy.

And, dxtgen will definitely convert SoftImage .pic files just fine -- 1.3.6 has a lot of .dxtbz2 files generated from the original SoftImage .pic files in data.pak. Note that SoftImage .pic is not the only file format that uses the .pic file extension; make sure you're actually in that format. If it wasn't for the BZ2 textures in SoftImage .pic format, I sure wouldn't support that weirdball file format. SoftImage eventually grew up and started supporting other file formats that are used by more than 0.00001% of end users, like .tga. But, not in the late 1990s.

-- GSH

[Nielk1]

Did the glowskins I sent help?

Also, PNGs do both types of alpha. It can get really confusing when a file has some of each.

[Zero Angel]

The glowskins you sent to me work perfectly in-game, though I have not yet tried making edits to them. I have resigned myself to the fact that if I want to edit glowskins, I would be required to reboot into Windows (BZ2 itself and all my modding tools run great on linux -- it's just that bz2dxtgen or GIMP does strange things to alpha when running under linux)

In regards to the pack you sent me, I would like to know if I can redistribute it, and if so who I should give credit to for doing the additional glowskins.

[GSH]

If you can get Paint.Net working under Linux, use it to edit images. Not The Gimp. Paint.net has user interface designers who don't hate your guts.

-- GSH

[Zero Angel]

I'm with you on the sucky GIMP UI design. The 2.7 (beta) version of the GIMP provides the ability to use MDI and dock toolbars, which is a really big improvement on the stable version. Paint.NET has an excellent UI design.

[Nielk1]

In regards to the pack you sent me, I would like to know if I can redistribute it, and if so who I should give credit to for doing the additional glowskins.

Yes. I think the *.lmm files are in there too, they gave a list of who was responsible for the pack in whole.