Quote:
Originally Posted by dc1sal
Is there a easy step-by-step way to do this?, I'm new...
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Yup! This tutorial will show you how to take a "pin up" image and make it into a mod that you can use to replace the in game pin up image for yourself and others.
First you need to make sure you have Gimp and Gimp's DDS plug-in's installed. They were linked earlier in this thread.
Next you need a suitable picture! I chose to use a picture of a
nice German girl drinking some beer.
In order to use this picture in game it's resolution (how big the picture is) will need to be
256 x 364. The original size of the image I choose was 560 x 840. Larger than we need, so we'll have to resize it a bit. You'll have better luck using a larger picture and making it smaller than you will trying to use a smaller picture.
So lets download the picture and open it in Gimp. The first thing we'll do is resize it down close to what we want. Since the image is taller than it is wider, we'll resize the image based on it's Width first. So from the menu bar select
Image then
Scale Image. Click the little down arrow next to Width till it reads
256. You'll notice the Height is 384, really close to what we wanted! Go ahead and click
Scale to save our resizing.
Now that we have the Width correct we need to change the height. Now, we could Scale again and only choose Height, but since there's some "negative space" in this picture (the stuff above her head) we'll go ahead and instead crop the image by changing the
Canvas Size. From the
Image menu choose
Canvas Size. As shown by the notes in the picture below, first click the chain between Width and Height to unlock them, so we'll only adjust the Height. Then click the
down arrow next to
Height till it reads
364.
As you click it in the picture preview below you'll see little lines start to close in on the picture. Once you're at 364
click and drag the image so that the part you want to keep is between the lines. Anything outside of the lines will be lost.
Finally select
All layers from the
Resize Layers dropdown and click
Resize button to save the canvas size changes.
Now we have a picture to use that's the correct size! Save it as a JPG file since we'll be using it in our documentation later on.
Now, to add the Alpha Chanel that the DDS file will need. From the
Layers, Channels, Paths, Undo bar on the left side of the screen
right click under the "Background" picture and choose
Add Alpha Channel.
Next we'll click on the Red/Green/Blue tab to view Channels. From there
left click on the
Red, Green and Blue lines. This will change their background from blue to white. Only
Alpha should still have a blue background, meaning it's the only layer selected.
Next select the
pink eraser tool from the Toolbox on the left side of the screen. You might want to set the
Scale to
10 to make the next step quicker.
The lower the
Opacity you set the brighter the image will be in game.
Now use the eraser on the main image to
erase it all! Try to do the entire image in one move or else you'll end up with varying levels of brightness. It'll replace the picture with
black and gray checkerboard pattern. You'll notice that the
Alpha, Red, Green, and Blue are all turning black. This is fine.
Now that we've erased the image, turning the Alpha Channel Black, we can save the image. Make sure you
name it pinup.dds and
save it as a DDS file.
Now that we have our image saved as a DDS it's time to make our mod! On my desktop I create a folder called
German Beer Girl Pinup Mod V1.0. Inside this folder I
create two new folders called
data and
documentation.
Under the data folder I'll create a series of folders that match the structure of the game files. The original pinup.dds goes in
data\Textures\TNormal\tex so I'll
create each of those folders under my German Beer Girl Pinup Mod V1.0\data folder. So first create
Textures, go into that folder and create
TNormal then go into
that folder and create
tex. Finally I'll go into
tex and
move my pinup.dds file there.
Since that's the only file in the game I'll be changing there's nothing more I need to do I'll backup in the folders and enter the
documentation folder I've created. Here I'll want to have four files. An
in game screenshot of the mod at work; the
original file I based the work on; the
readme file for my mod and finally a
readme.jsgme file which will control a tooltip in the JSGME program.
The
readme.jsgme is just a readme.txt file I'll create and change it's extension to
jsgme. That and my
German Beer Girl Pinup Mod V1.0 Readme.txt file I'm going to borrow the format of from NauticalWolf's format since it's awesome.
Then I'll put the pictures in there as well. I'll zip all of this up and post it to my FileFront account for others to download.
So people can download my mod at
http://www.filefront.com/16158685/GBGPV1.0.zip/ Then'll unzip it and
install it via JSGME and end up with something like this:
And finally, here's our new picture hanging proudly in the forward torpedo room of our VII class u-boot!
