Just a quick thingie.

I looked at some of the packages, and thought of a good aestetic idea. For the artifact icons, I changed one of them from having a black background to having a transparent one. No real reason other than to look better

. if dru says he'll put it in if he has time, then I'll fix them all up nice and pretty.

Does anybody know of a .dds file viewer that has copy-paste abilities? Everything I've found so far can't do a thing, except for one which exports it to targa, but it's all discolored and scaled x:y 4:1 O.o, and another which reads it and any transparency perfectly, but you can't export or even copy the image for use in another program -_-

Kohan wrote:

Does anybody know of a .dds file viewer that has copy-paste abilities? Everything I've found so far can't do a thing, except for one which exports it to targa, but it's all discolored and scaled x:y 4:1 O.o, and another which reads it and any transparency perfectly, but you can't export or even copy the image for use in another program -_-

First and foremost, .dds files are DX Direct Draw files, so I imagine they will be hard to deal with to begin with. Photoshop might be able to copy and paste, I can't say fo sho.
http://www.filext.com/detaillist.php?extdetail=dds&Search=Search

Tidu! wrote:

I looked at some of the packages, and thought of a good aestetic idea. For the artifact icons, I changed one of them from having a black background to having a transparent one. No real reason other than to look better . if dru says he'll put it in if he has time, then I'll fix them all up nice and pretty.

Lemme see it?

Photoshop handles them just make sure you don't import the mip maps (it asks you when you open the file) and when you save you need to make sure the background layer is visible or you will get an error.

Links to dds converters
http://wiki.beyondunreal.com/wiki/Nvidia_Texture_Tools
http://developer.nvidia.com/object/nv_texture_tools.html

Also I believe the Gimp has one built in.

Continuum wrote:

Photoshop handles them just make sure you don't import the mip maps (it asks you when you open the file) and when you save you need to make sure the background layer is visible or you will get an error.

Links to dds converters
http://wiki.beyondunreal.com/wiki/Nvidia_Texture_Tools
http://developer.nvidia.com/object/nv_texture_tools.html

Also I believe the Gimp has one built in.

The nVidia dev site has a 3ds Max plugin? Argh that's cool!

I totally forgot about Gimp. Kohan, Google "Gimp" and check it out, it might be what you are looking for.

Anyone know if GIMP is compatible with Photoshop plugins?

Kohan wrote:

Anyone know if GIMP is compatible with Photoshop plugins?

GTMF!
http://members.home.nl/m.weisbeek/gimp/#ps

What plugins do you need?

GIMP doesn't have a .dds plug-in when you get it, so you'll have to google it. It should be one of the top results, and you just put it in your plug-ins folder and can export dxt5 dxt3 or dxt1 and generate mip maps too. But best to leave the editor do that, mipmaps never worked for me when I generated them in gimp.

I was wondering because nVidia had a photoshop .dds plugin, so I wanted to know if GIMP was compatible. This makes things quite a bit easier. Also, what's the best import-able filetype for alpha transparency? The only one GIMP originally supports that can be imported is targa. When I import that, it looks fine, but when it shows up as an artifact (I replaced one of the icons to test), it looks like an alpha-map, going from yellow (it was a fuzzy yellow circle) to nearly black, and then transparent when solidly so. Whatever, I'll experiment.

As I read through this thread, I realize I probably shouldn't have called it 'Jsut A Quick Thingie'

.

hmm... Looks like the gimp plugin only reads.

ucc.exe can create .dds files (and package them) although youd have to research on how it does that (noticed the ucc.log file after exporting from upaint yesterday) I'd check out unreal wiki or the UDN to see if they have any thing on it.

Also check out microsofts direct X SDK if you don't have any luck with the others I'm sure since you seem to know a bit about coding there should be a faily easy way to make a converter of some sorts. I'm actually halfway thinking of trying to make one myself if I can find the time/skills

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=4E825A37-0C94-4421-9EC8-156E52525D11&displaylang=en

Kohan wrote:

Also, what's the best import-able filetype for alpha transparency? The only one GIMP originally supports that can be imported is targa. When I import that, it looks fine, but when it shows up as an artifact (I replaced one of the icons to test), it looks like an alpha-map, going from yellow (it was a fuzzy yellow circle) to nearly black, and then transparent when solidly so. Whatever, I'll experiment.

I have used this numerous times to get alpha textures, and to make it transparent, I right-clicked, went to Layers>Transparency>Color to Alpha. There, you can choose a color that you want to be transparent. That method worked fine in my maps, and I would guess that it'd be the same when being displayed on the HUD too.

edit: This is the result I got:

I'm gonna try to animate them now. I don't know much about what can be displayed on the hud. Does it have to be a regular texture, or can shaders be applied to the hud?

Color to alpha? So it goes through, and depending on how close a given color is to the color you select, makes it that much transparent? I'll see if I can get you a screenshot of what I mean with the whole not-transparent-until-totally-so thing.

Yes. In the icons, I first did color to alpha on the black color, but this also made the icon itself a little transparent. I kept it for the globe, as you can see, it's transparent, and the triple a bit, and the lightning too. BUt I obviously couldnt' do it for the charm and the teleporter and boots, so I just rope-selected the object, inverted selection, then made all of that transparent and added the white brush strokes on that selection.

Um... okay. Perhaps my problem has something to do with it being in the GUI and not the level as a texture... I'll need to test it against a bright surface to actually tell if there is a problem, as I only saw it as not being transparent against dark gray and space backgrounds.