Icon problems

[Dianoga]

Just a quick question here. So I just installed the 1.3PB6 patch and found out I had to convert all my textures to DXTBZ2. That's cool, got the generator thing, converted all the textures and put them in and voila, all my models show up properly in game with the correct textures. The problem I'm having is with the unit icons and the wire frames (when you're in a ship) not showing up properly. They just look like a bunch of pixels but not really a picture. Is there something different that has to be done with them or did I just screw up the conversion somewhere? I did try doing some searching on the forums here but either I'm just not looking for the right thing or the answers are not there.

Thanks for any info!

[Zero Angel]

Have you tried converting them to PNG format? I believe XnView can do the necessary conversions.

[GSH]

Rerun BZ2DXTGen. Look at the log it generates, specifically for what it says it did for your icon textures. I suspect you've got an odd size used. If so, you can use the options .cfg to specifically shrink/scale/fold/spindle/multilate any texture (or any mip of any texture) as desired.

-- GSH

[Dianoga]

Yep, you are exactly right GSH. It's a size issue I guess. Here is part of what it records:

151/ 173 icon_ivtitan.png Icon: Scale to 32x32, 1 mip Done.

161/ 173 wire_ivtitan.png Wireframe: scale to 128x128, 1 mip Done.

Now the thing is, all my wireframes are 128x128. The icons are a different size, I use 64x64 so yea that needs changed. I'm not sure what the mip size is suppose to be, it says for 2d textures use 1. All my wireframes and icons are fullcolor, not sure if that makes a difference. So in the BZ2DXTOptions.cfg file am I suppose to change the Prescale values under the Rules for icon_* and wire_*? I tried changing the icon one to 64x64 but it didn't change anything, it still came out with the comments. Sorry about all the questions, first time I've come across this and used the DXTGen.

[GSH]

I think all the stock icons and wireframes are the size it's set to use, so the resize in BZ2DXTGen effectively does nothing. (I.e. "change size to 128x128... but it's already 128x128, so that's done.") If you want, you can zip and email me (email address is on bottom of official pb6 download page) your two source textures, and I can see what it's doing, and why.

The # of mips is the # of reduced-size versions of the image. See here for more info. Things that will be in 3D should have a full set of mipmaps, so that things in the distance look better. But, things in 2D usually only want 1 mipmap, because some video cards will pick a smaller mip ("because that's faster") and give a more chunky view.

-- GSH

[Dianoga]

Email sent, appreciate the help.

[Nielk1]

I think you can use bigger sizes for icons but I don't know how that would look in game. If they downscale or if they would get cropped. The default rules for BZ2DXTGen forces 32 by 32 for them.

[Dianoga]

I've been using these icons for quite some time now at the size they are I only have a problem with the dxtgen. I also tried changing one of the icons to 32x32 and it still said the same thing.

[GSH]

The message is always printed for a filename starting with 'icon_' or 'wire_'. Doesn't matter what the original size was. You can edit your copy of BZ2DXTGenOptions.cfg to squelch the message.

As emailed back to Dianoga, this appears to be some interaction between libpng and OpenIL for png textures with a transparent color, but withOUT an alpha channel. (i.e., a 24-bit image with one color marked as transparent.) All of BZ2's wire_* and icon_* have an alpha channel (i.e. 32 bit image), and they seem to convert fine. Try either adding an alpha channel, or a different file format that supports 32-bit images, such as .bmp/.tga/.tif[f].

-- GSH

[Dianoga]

I got your email and thanks for looking at it. I made those icons and wires a year or so ago and just finally remembered where I made them. I actually just used 3d studio max renders and saved them as a png so maybe that is part of the problem there. I'll just go through and convert them to a 32bit format using Photoshop as suggested. Thanks again for the help.

[GSH]

BZ2 DXTGen v30, posted to the usual site of http://matesfamily.org/bz2/ , should be able to read those .png files with transparent colors rather than an alpha channel and convert them correctly. Give it a try.

-- GSH