Dawn of Man Image Help SOLVED

Patcheresu

Chieftain
Joined
Jun 13, 2012
Messages
38
Location
United States of America
Gedemon's post is the solution.

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Yes, I know there are tutorials. Did they help? No. Did the Modders Guide help? No. Here's the situation.

I have the image in the right size, 1024x768x24 after it converts, all ready to go. Problem.

Because apparently making it the right dimmensions and default format with no compression didn't work. I got a Texture didn't load error. Please don't act like I should know what I'm talking about, I literally have no clue what I am supposed to do other than file format and dimmensions.

No guide explains the right compression, layering, transparency, or format for Dawn of Man images. Or Graphics. Another thing no one seems to indulge in explaining. Anyone who has successfully made a custom Dawn of Man image, which is the one that appears at the Begin Your Journey screen as the game loads, what did you do?

And please don't just redirect me to DDS creation for beginners, as I have no idea which tutorial I should use, other than the fact that I shouldn't use the icons one.
 
"didn't work" is not a very useful description for a problem :D

I've used different compression without to many problems in my WWII mods, using same dimension as original may be required, don't know, modding is all trial and errors until you find the right settings...

If it can help you, my DoM for WWII are DDS DXT1 (Opaque/1-bit Alpha) Compressed using Cluster fit (Slow/HQ) Error Metric Uniform using paint.net.

Well, not sure it will help you.

But what may is trying to set VFS to true in your modbuddy project for your DDS file.
 
Sorry, I'll update my post. The texture didn't load.

Also, for some inconceivable reason, my Leader Icon keeps being replaced by a white empty space. My Civ Symbol is unaffected though. It however does not give any loading errors.

I'll also update on whether or not your idea worked, I'm working on the mod now.

Oh, you're the guy who made R.E.D.! I was actually trying to use your mods script as an example because Queen of Iceni is outdated. Couldn't find what went where. And a guy around here who made Hitler, Fuhrer of the Third Reich managed to help me figure out that I could use text to describe things instead of Row Tags. No wonder everything looked so odd.

Thanks for your help! It worked! Problem solved.
 
"didn't work" is not a very useful description for a problem :D

What he said. Unless you tell people exactly what error messages you're getting, we can't generally help you. We can guess blindly at all the various things that can possibly go wrong in the process, but half of those guesses will be things you've already checked and the other half will be things that might not apply to your situation at all. When you have a serious problem that you can't track down, we usually suggest attaching your mod to your post (in .zip form) so that people can see the actual code/assets and the .modinfo file.

But Gedemon's guess is the most likely: most of the existing guides don't mention the VFS because most guides were written before the VFS flag was added in December 2010. So if you're relatively new at this and have been following those guides, it's the most likely mistake. (And if you don't know what we mean by VFS, search this board for it; it's a common issue.)

And honestly, don't get so hung up on the guides and what they do or don't explain. These guides and tutorials weren't written by the game's developers or anything; most of them were written by people who learned these things the hard way, trying various options until they found something that worked. You can do that, too; it's not always fun, but it CAN be done.
 
Yeah, sorry. Every single file in my Art folder is set to True for Import to VFS.

Which reminds me. Need to look into that because despite using an entirely different picture, some icons sill just show empty white space.

They were set to True before the posting of this thread.
 
Need to look into that because despite using an entirely different picture, some icons sill just show empty white space.

This can happen for a wide variety of reasons. Here are a few I've found:
> Your cache is dirty. You'd see this sort of thing happen if you changed the icon file without leaving the game, but it'll also happen if the cache didn't clear properly after the last time the game exited. Go into your user directory, go into the Cache subdirectory, and delete everything in there.
> The icon atlas is misaligned. You'll see this sort of thing happen if you do something like declare the 64-pixel version of your icons to use a 256-pixel atlas, since the X and Y spacing will be off. Without seeing your XML, I can't tell you whether your icon atlas was declared incorrectly.
> The file didn't load at all. While VFS is the typical culprit here, you can get it for other reasons: incorrect path for the files, permission issues, invalid compression type (I use BC3/DXT5 for everything, which incidentally requires your X and Y dimensions to be multiples of 4), and so on. Sometimes it's as simple as a typo in the .modinfo file, other times it's really hard to track down.
> Bad layers, usually involving the alpha channel. I'd run into this pretty often when I tried making an icon atlas using the provided 4-layer .psd templates, but when I use the community-made XCF templates instead (which have only 2 layers, one alpha and one image) it'd work far better. My mods use hundreds of custom icons, and I haven't had problems in a long time.

While I haven't tried uploading a Dawn of Man image, I HAVE added a .dds image to the background of the Advanced Setup screen and added a new area in the Policies popup, so the above comments generally still hold.

Again, the best solution when you get really, truly stuck on something is to post your mod here. The ENTIRE mod, not just copying the XML into your post. The attachment function for the board accepts .zip files; just remember that your user storage limit is for all attachments in all posts you make, so once the issue gets resolved you should come back in here and delete the attachments.
 
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