A Few Questions about Textures

[Sirius]

Black transparency on what display - the texture view (which one?) or mine view? Are the textures involved metl146 (primary) and misc037 (secondary)? What palette are you using?

[TSXMike]

The black appears in-game and where the transparency should be. The textures are metl146 (primary) and metl153 (secondary). It does work okay with metl146 (prim) and misc037 (sec) though. The palette is groupa.

edit: on the texture tab, the left texture view that says the names of the textures underneith has black where transparency should be too. The scaling screen that shows the texture (with the unstretching buttons underneith) has white where the transparency should be.

Another edit: it does this any time I put 2 transparent textures over top of each other, for ex, a fence (as a closed or normal wall) with lights on it as secondary.

Thanks

[Sirius]

Oh... I think you might be running into a limitation of the Descent texture system. Stacking two transparent textures on top of each other doesn't work properly, unless the secondary texture has "see-through" pixels like misc037 does. I'm not sure why that happens but I remember seeing that back in '97 under D2 DOS (although back then you got hall-of-mirrors instead of black).

[TSXMike]

Right, I just realized that I will have to use the other transparency color that doors use and modify the texture. Its just odd that it worked before, and note that when it worked before, the robots still couldn't see me through it.

One idea for a mod was to have screen mounts hanging down (just bars) from the ceiling (as a wall), and then I could put screens there as secondary textures to look like screens hanging down, but that didn't work either.

Using the other transparent texture will work, but the only limitation would be I have to build the mount and the screen together as the same texture meaning the screen won't blow since its a primary. So I would then have to make the screen with purple transparency everywhere except where the bars are so it can blow and be see through but show the bars. The only limitation then is I can't put any screen on the mount. It would have to be just one I picked.

So that clears it up! Thanks

[TSXMike]

Cool, I got the hanging screen-mount idea I said above to work by making the background the see-through-all transparency (the one doors use). I learned that all the attributes or "side effects" that come with screens are built into that slot, and let me guess, built into the HAM file. No problem, now I'm starting to learn how to work the textures within the limitations of the game, and also that screen-modding is quite a bit more complex than I first thought. I realized that you have to mod not just the blowing/blown counterparts, but also the post-reactor one too. Thanks a bunch for the direction. As far as the fence with poles, it was just an experiment that came from the screen idea not working at first.

[Sirius]

Yeah I think you're right on all of that, the animation frame count and framerate are defined in the HAM file, and probably also the blown/reactor state clip numbers. Descent 3 was a lot more flexible on all of that - but making levels for it was so much work...