Alpha Channels, Camo Nets, Spartan Turret

[Monkie]

I was working with the camo nets and the Spartan Turret and came across an Alpha channel problem. I am using DXTBMP to work with the textures and everytime I save the texture with the BMP as a 32Bit BMP the entire texture is alphaing out and dissapearing in the sim. When the Alpha channel is removed and the BMP is saved as a 24 bit then the texture appears. I am using the exact Alpha that came with the textures (the camo one was the texture that was uploaded in the repository) and they are simple black on white, no grey at all. Any suggestions? might it be the DXTBMP program is that causing the issue?

[Sergei]

I cannot comment on DXTBMP since I've never tried it, but at least GIMP is capable of saving the alpha channels correctly for CMSF without any special tricks, so it might be that DXTBMP uses a different encoding or something. In the alpha channel black is fully opaque, white is fully transparent and with gray shades you can do windows etc.

[Monkie]

I used GIMP and was able to get the Cammo Nets to work just fine so in that case it was DXTBMP which seemed unable to deal with the Alpha layer. I simply resaved the BMP textures that didn't work in the GIMP program and then they worked fine in the game. However when I tried to redo the Spartan Turret using GIMP all of the texture was transparent. Scratching my head a bit on it. Luckily few of the vehicle textures use Alpha layers so far.

[Sergei]

I'm afraid I don't have a clue why that is happening. But one thing that you ought to be careful about is to check that all the channels that you want to be visible really are. It is all too easy to hide coloured channels while working on alpha, then load a different image and wonder why nothing's showing.