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Originally Posted by HansVonBeehan
woo! 
say i have 20 Warships on atm
and get another say 10 do I need to say 30?
or just 10? as will it be added? or do i need to keep count for all my ships i sunk? |
Your patrol reports need to reflect the
totals for your boat. That way there's no confusion about how many kills are on the flags and the boat.
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Originally Posted by Te Kaha
DT, how about adding ribbons for medals earned to the battle flag?
And a graphics question, what's the use of the alpha channel, and how to create it? Frequently I do my conning tower updates myself, and I safe the dds without alpha.
And the ever same question - believe me I searched - which file gives away the info when the combo skin changes from black to grey?
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I like that idea, TK. I'll have to get with SQK to see if he can change the patrol report form to allow for medals and we'll have to come up with some appropriate ribbons for the flags.
As for tha alpha channel, it can serve a couple of purposes. The only one that I'm familiar with is to determine which parts of the texture appear in the game. For instance, on the textures for the command bar at the bottom of the screen, there are sections of the texture that are for the background, buttons and icons that go on the buttons. on the icons, for instance, only the parts of the icon that are included in the alpha layer are displayed over top of the button graphic. The parts of the icon that are not included in the alpha layer are "invisible". Basically the way I look at the alpha layer is that it is a selection of the graphic that is visible and the rest of the graphic is invisible. If you open up one of the GUI files (for instance E:\Games\Silent Hunter 4\Data\Menu\Gui\UserRadio.dds, substituting your install folder for "E:\Games\Silent Hunter 4") in photoshop, then click "select" on the menu bar, click load selection then click OK while the channel is set at "Alpha 1", then the alpha layer will show as selected. Conversely, in order to create (or modify) and alpha channel, you can select the areas that you want to be in the alpha, click select in the menu bar, click save selection, change channel to alpha 1 (or create new and name it alpha 1), then click the radio button for the option you want to perform (New channel, Add to channel, Subtract from channel or Intersect with channel) then click OK and the alpha will be modified/created according to your entries.
As far as the conning tower and submarine T02 and T02 files go, save them as a DXT1 with no alpha. This reduces the size of the texture files since the alpha isn't needed. For the O01 files, save as a DXT5 (interpolated alpha) if you modify those files at all. Most of the time, you won't need to modify those. I only do so to put the hull numbers in the bow of the subs so that they won't be mirrored on the left side.
Finally, for the dates that the sub changes from black to grey (if the skin is set up that way), you'll need to look at two different files, one for the sub body and one for the conning tower. For the sub body, for instance, for the Gato, look at the E:\Games\Silent Hunter 4\Data\UPCData\UPCUnitsData\UnitParts1Gato.upc (again substituting your game install folder for "E:\Games\Silent Hunter 4"). Open it up with your favorite text editor and search for T01 and T02 and you will see the lines that control the dates that the textures are used.
The conning tower is a little more complicated in that the textures used on it can be specified in the actual .dat file for the conning tower. If you'll look
here, you'll see a work around for a texture conflict with another mod that demonstrates how the texture is specified in the .dat file for the conning tower. In the E:\Games\Silent Hunter 4\Data\Submarine\NSS_Gato\NSS_Gato.upc you'll see (several lines down at the first part of the file) the dates that each conning tower is used.
Hope that helps and thanks for the idea about the ribbons on the flags, that's a nice touch
