Little Help with DDS?

[Lucozade33]

Hi all!

Thanks to Kael's awesome guide, I've been able to get my first new CIV 5 civ up and running. Still, I'm having some serious issues with .dds:

Question 1:
For those of you who have read Kael's guide and also looked into his mod for "Queen of some or another Celt who's name escapes me at the moment" you may have noticed that in the guide the picture of the IconAtlases have a black background as they do with the IconAtlases that came with the SDK. But if you open up Kael's Celtic Queen mod, you'll notice that the black background for those IconAtlases is nonexsistant and the Foreground consists of just the white dots. What the dilly, yo?
I don't get it, how did he do that? Is it important to do? If I delete the background layer, it does nothing for me. And the dds's are just barely working sometimes when they feel like it. Anyone want to post an dds for civ making tutorial?

Question 2:
In the .xml file defining the civilizations, there's a line that says <MapImage>MapEngland512.dds</MapImage>, which is certainly for that map of whatever empire you get when choosing your starting player at the set up screen (in this case, England). But are those dds files? I've searched my computer for MapEngland512.dds, but I can't find it...anyone know where it is...somewhere compressed deep inside the structure of my computer where the binary 1s and 0s play?

Thanks for the help in advance!

 

[Wirapuru]

I didn't make any DDS for civ5 yet but maybe you can consider:

1. DDS has almost 20 formats (yep, "inside" the format we hav more formats), and from what I could see Kael's files uses DXT1 for all, except one 'LeaderLegends64.dds' (uses DXT3, maybe a mistake?). Another thing you should see is the alpha channel, all of them have one. Alpha channel means: 255 (white) meais it's 100% visible and 0 (black) 0%, you can have any level of gray on that.

2. Maybe they are on the .fpk files, which reside on you {steam games folder}\sid meier's civilization V\resource subfolders. To extract the files you'll use Nexus/Script Browser/Extract fpks script.

 

[Voyhkah]

2. Maybe they are on the .fpk files, which reside on you {steam games folder}\sid meier's civilization V\resource subfolders. To extract the files you'll use Nexus/Script Browser/Extract fpks script.

Where do the files go once they're extracted?

 

[Wirapuru]

They'll be extracted to the same folder as theirs .fpk parents, like for example every file inside {steam games}\sid meier's civilization v\resource\DX9\WonderTextures.fpk will be on ...\resource\DX9\ too.

 

[Voyhkah]

When I tried it, they weren't there.

 

[Wirapuru]

I would mention that but I thought it was some crazyness on my head. I had exactly the same impression, I swear first time I did it there weren't files anywhere. Then, I don't know if I did run the script again, fired up SDK or the game, but the files are there now. Sorry about this crazy answer, I don't understand either. Try to run it again, make sure of permissions and disk free space. ;/

 

[Voyhkah]

They still aren't there.


My Nexus always says "Error establishing asset paths" when it starts. Cpould this have something to do with it?

 

[Wirapuru]

Hm, probably. Do you have an error message every time you start Nexus? I had this problem, had to fix it manually: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=385031

 

[Voyhkah]

Fixed it!

 

[Lord Shadow]

DDS DXT1 doesn't interpret alpha channels well enough. The difference between DXT1 and DXT3 might be something like that between GIF and PNG: the former has only one colour for transparency (alpha), while the latter has 256 (8-bit alpha channel).

The relation isn't identical as far as the DDS types are concerned, but DXT3 has way better alpha support (it shows on the images) and is supported by both Civ4 and Civ5, so there's no reason to use DXT1. DXT5 is even more advanced, and I think it's supported, but I don't know the details.

 

[Wirapuru]

Eh nice to know that, I remeber always having to use the same DDS compression as the 'official' game files with no options since game engines are so ehm picky. I'll definitely use DXT3 knowing this