DDS transparency

[WildWeazel]

I changed some DDS textures for a yet-to-be-announced graphics tweak, and to my dismay the background showed up as black in the game. After the initial panic of thinking I would have to deal with palettes again , I tried exporting the textures to PNG format instead of BMP.
It turns out that the transparency is built into the image, not deduced from palette entries. So when you export textures, save them in PNG format to make your life easier. BMP does not support transparency, so the transparent areas become black. PNG, OTOH, has an alpha channel (an extra value in the color code for transparency, for you non-graphics people), so you can edit in WYSIWYG mode. I haven't tried it yet, but I assume this means DDS has full alpha channel support, so we can have various levels of transparency. I can imagine some interesting effects.
I'm sure you graphics experts already new this, but it was news to me.

 

[zilo]

Interesting. Does the engine actually support layered textures? I have yet to see an in-game model with multiple layers.

 

[Gaias]

The only thing I seen in the files that used layerd textures where the leaderheads.

 

[zilo]

That's a good sign. A great sign, even.

Gaias, regarding your sig. Have you gotten any of the niftools to function with Civ4's files? Running niflyze on the colonial regular from the American Revolution mod causes what appears to be an endless loop.