Problems with UTFEdit and glowing textures

Wed May 03, 2006 4:30 pm by polyfiller

Folks, I'm having problems with adding glowing textures to some SFC 3 and Bridge commander ships I'm in the process of playing around with converting. I've done some succesful additions of lighting to some ships (they look great) and I've done exactly the same thing with others ... and they cause FL to CTD.

Here's what I do;

1) Save both the main texture and the glowing texture files as .TGA's from Photoshop (after flipping them).

2) I use UTF edit to edit a previously succesful .MAT file for the ship I am working on (succesful in that it works without glowing textures).

3) I use UTF edit to add the following Et_Flags (set to Int array, 64,0)
4) Add Et_name (set to the name of the illumination .tga file)
5) I edit the Type for the texture to DcDtEt
6) I add the illumination texture at the bottom and import it after setting it to MIP0.

This has worked great for 4 ships ... but 3 or 4 more just CTD. I've tried backing out and adding a single illumination texture at a time .. and no go.

I've checked the image information in photoshop and the ships that work have both grey 8 bits per channel .TGa's and some are coluer RGB 8 bit.

Any suggestions ?

Thu May 04, 2006 10:19 pm by Cold_Void

sounds like you got it all right - only thing i can think of is bad .tga/ changing the type to DcDtEcEt

Tue May 09, 2006 6:22 pm by polyfiller

Cold_void - thanks for taking an interest and replying. For those interested in an update I found that for some reason using .TGA's when trying to create glowing textures can give problems.

I have now overcome the problem by reading most of the tutorials on here and decided my best bet was to go for .DDS tectures, even though there was nothing to suggest that this would fix my problem. After wrestling with the rather buggy .DDS exporter for PSP I am now able to create glowing textures. I am in the process of converting a whole bunch of star trek ships and have found there there are still some strange issues ... for example some txtures (especially with Bridge commander ships) have to be copied from their original and pasted into a new, non transparent image and saved as .DDS. The reverese seems to apply to the illumination file, but not always.... the effect that can crop up is the illumination file completely blanks out the main texture ... making the ship blank with lights. Anyhoiw through trial and error, and lot's of UTF work, I seem to be able to sort out each ship I try now.

For anyone who's interested I've got an enterprise D and Sovereign which look pretty much like they do in the films / TV ... all the red & blue glows and lot's of nice little white lights over the hull / saucer ... makes flying in dark systems a real pleasure.

When I've got through doing more of my conversion I may write a tutuorial on converting SFC and Bridge commander ship models to freelancer.

Tue May 16, 2006 3:53 pm by Cold_Void

forgive the tardiness of this reply, but i have been rather busy cranking out icons to replace..well every icon in the game. these are just observations and tips about PSP and the image formats

re glowing tga problems:
well, i have a hunch mixing a .tga with a .dds is a no-no, should either be one or the other i think. why not use DcDtEcEt as your Type? afaik the only difference is that an Ec node which isn't required will colorize the texture, which should save some memory overhead when using a b&w format for the map

with .dds;i find that using mips in the glowmap creates an ugly blur around the edges & inconsistencies in how its drawn in realtime; i suspect its a dithering/mip filter effect or my crappy gfx card

with .tga's in PSP, save in 24bit uncompressed - and if you make an alpha channel save it as Alpha Channel 1.if you want lit-windows without effecting the rest of the lit texture you should master making masks and saving them to alpha, psp8 is clunky in the way it displays this stuff so it can be hit&miss until you're more familiar with it, and remember to save work in the PSP format because it imports .tga's w/ alphas merged- which makes the background white and pretty difficult to convert to a mask

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