Importing textures...

[Isotoxin]

So...I've made a rly fast texture thinggy, which I wanna import into my map, the problem is, I'm getting a weird crash the whole time.

What I did is :
-I opened photoshop. (little bit logic, lol.)
-I made a new file/canvas. (256 by 256 pixels.)
-I wrote my text one it, with a blood font.
-I saved it as a ''PCX'' file.

If someone could help me...Thanks!

Here is the thing which I made...





I want to use it as a masked texture.

[Bloeb]

Did you try to decrease the color-depth to 256 colors (use dithering if you need to do this) ? Also, in order to make a masked texture the first color in your colorpalette should be the same as your background.

[JackGriffin]

Image mode should be "indexed color" too. I miss that sometimes.

[Isotoxin]

And how to change the colordepth?

[Creavion]

First of all, PCX is can act strange (although I doubt that in the case of photoshop), I only know it does not work (correctly) with programms like Xnview (although they support it).
Many programms seem to mess up the PCX files. So you better trust BMP.

Look at the upper menu
File________Edit________Picture (I think), click on Picture -> first entry .. something with "Mode" I think (I have a german PS version, so I dont know for sure), there you will find Indexed Colours.

[Myth]

To clear up confusion:

• Unreal engine stores textures in uncompressed 8-bit BMP files inside UTX files. (your files get converted to this anyway...)
• Unreal editor can import uncompressed 8-bit BMP files and even truecolor 24-bit BMP files.
• Unreal editor can also import rle compressed 8-bit PCX files, and only this kind of PCX files.
• The width and height of a texture must be power of 2. All of these combinations should work: (2,4,8,16,32,64,256,512,1024,2048,4096)x(2,4,8,16,32,64,256,512,1024,2048,4096)
• Masked textures have the first color in the palette set as transparent.
• Always set to generate mip-maps. You always want your textures get mip-mapped. Some renderers have settings to not to use textures beyond a specific size. The standard direct3d has it's limit at 256x256 If mip maps are not available the game will crash.

What you're doing wrong is not having RLE compression enabled when you save as PCX.
Also make sure it's in 8-bit and has a palette with a maximum of 256 color entries.

However I agree with Creavion, you should only use 8-bit BMP files because:
• Unreal engine stores them in this form anyway
• You can view them in windows when you set the folder view to thumbnails
• You can upload them on the internet and browsers can display it

There is more to it, but this 100% correct and works.

[Hook]

Myth, can you clear something up about your post?

In this part: " and ever truecolor 24-bit BMP files."
What does "ever" mean? - Is it a typo? (should it be: never? or even? or?)

[Myth]

Yes, that's a typo.

ever>even

[JackGriffin]

Ferali did a long and detailed explanation to me about the positives of BMP versus PCX. If he gets time and posts it here it is worth the reading. I strictly use BMP now.

[Bloeb]

I'm pretty interested to hear about those advantages, because I can only think of a disadvantage. I could be wrong but when you import a 24bits bitmap it still has to be converted to a 256 indexed color bitmap. Unfortunately you can't choose the conversion-methods (e.g. dithering) yourself.

[Creavion]

you can't choose the conversion-methods (e.g. dithering) yourself.

Thats why you have do to something like that in photoshop (or gimp). In most cases even problematical textures can be somehow converted (sky textures excluded). I would not make use of 24 bit textures there in any way.

That happens if you import an 24 Bit texture into UEd 2.0 (UT). Since the user did not limit the texture to 256 colours the ued forces a limitation which lets the texture somehow look darker and/or lower in contrast. (at least for Software Rendering)

In UEd 2.1 (Unreal 1 227g) I have both the Window Render and the viewport render set to D3D9. The texture will be shown correctly. BTW: I only opened the map I created in UT UEd 2.0. So as you might see, the Editor converted this to DXT1. (the 256 colour limited textures are P8)

I changed the 3D viewport window to software and it looks again like in the UT UEd 2.0.

[Isotoxin]

K, that worked. thanks alot.

[SzGergo]

Ok, i tell you something funny, how i usualy import textures.
No, this is not the proiper way, i am just sharing this
- I draw something in PS.
- save it in .bmp. (usualy in 24bit) since I could not import the .pcx created with ps into the ued
- i manualy change the extension .bmp to .pcx in total commander or whatever, since i could not import such .bmp files into UEd properly either (maybe i never set to indexed colors, hm, who nows)...
- UEd now imports that bmp-pcx thingy...

however sometimes i get small "holes" in the texture, more likely in the mipmaps: some pixels become transparent.
I think somehow when the picture get compressed some pixels get the first value of the palette... however it is still stange, since i never set the texture to be masked, so it should not be a hole there.

Well, i think when i go home i will read the wiki about how palettes work and what does "indexed color" and "dithering" mean exactly and such.

[Creavion]

Jesus. PS is not the only way to save as 256 colours. Xnview can do this as well, although the results are not that great IMO. Thats really not difficult^^.

Those holes: Actually it can/should only happen if you import them as mask or try to set them to Mask?

[SzGergo]

But i did not imported it as masked. (and neither set it to masked in its properties window)
As far as i remember in some cases the mipmaps got punctured.
Apart from never been set to masked it is still strange, since how can a value of any pixel become 0 by the compression process generating those mipmaps, when not a single transparent pixel were ever drawn in the base texture.
Also as far as i remember the phenomenon is not completely reproducable, the location of the transparent pixels varies.
I assume the error is caused by my stupid process of changing the extendsion of an anyway improper bitmap.
Actualy exporting it and importing back sometimes eradicates those holes, but not always.
Well i will try some importing scenarios later today to find out what happens when