[REQ] Looking for helpful hints regarding modifying objective icons on navmap

[greekfire]

I need a few pointers regarding a small mod I am trying to complete. I am trying to reduce the size of the the objective icon at start of career patrols on the nav map. I think it is too big and I wanted to make it at least 50% smaller.

I found the objectives.dds in data/menu/gui/career start. I converted it to a jpeg and reduced it in size by 50% and then converted it back to a dds file. It only shrunk the objective icon on the loading screen for career patrol start, the actual ingame nav map still showed the large objective icon. Also, the objective icon at in loading screen that DID shrink ended up just having a big black box around it where it was shrunk so even though the specific icon was smaller, the black box still took up the original space. I hope i explained that well.

One thing I was thinking was that I might have to reduce it's reading size in the menu_1024_768.ini . I know that the objectives.dds icon is read several times within the menu.file

any help or ideas would be greatly appreciated. thnx a million

[Chock]

The black box around the icon sounds like there might be no alpha channel on your image file, you may have lost this during the conversion process to jpeg.

If you don't know much about alpha channels, here's a brief explanation: Basically, an alpha channel recognises 256 levels of grayscale with (usually) the colour black on an alpha channel indicating where you want transparency, and white on the alpha channel where you want opacity. Any shade on the range of 256 levels of grayscale in between these two extremes will give you variable opacity. Most 3D games use this technique to render areas of transparency on textures, i.e. the gaps between the wheel spokes on a racing car in a racing game will be on the textures's alpha channel coloured black.

If you are using Photoshop: to get a black colour (for example to copy something and paste it onto the alpha channel), you can press the 'D' key to go to default black and white for foreground and background colours, however, on the alpha channel this is not necessary, as the foreground and background colours will automatically switch to black and white. Incidentally, you can easily create an alpha channel for your texture by going to the channels palette and clicking on the options and selecting 'new channel'. You will see this appear on the bottom of your channel list below RGB/CMYK or whatever mode you are in.

For more information on alpha channels, you can check out the Adobe website for Photoshop tutorials (they'll be just as informative if you use a different image editing program), or search for one of the many modding tutorials for games, the principle is the same whether you are modding Doom, SH4, Flight Simulator or whatever. A quick search on google for alpha channel tutorials will probably yield some results too.

For more info on what graphic file format supports what, this is a good link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_file_format