Inner workings of terrain art

[DiggetyBo]

Hey guys,

I thought it would be really fun and easy to replace a tile, but to my surprise, this task has been putting up a hell of a fight. I can't figure out what I'm doing wrong

I attached the .tga I'm working with. I want to replace the citadel dirt tile with a semi transparent grid bar type of tile. So basically between the bars it will be transparent. In BLP factory, the transparency is evident, but when I place it in WE, it's just white. I have never had this problem, I know how to make things transparent, heck, I even made a cliff partially transparent, and its still working to this day.

Yet I still started to doubt weather it was possible to make a transparent floor tile. As a test, I tried making a doodad in the same way, but no luck, the area between the bars was white, not transparent. It's like my blp factory stopped working correctly or something.

The other problem was when I placed it, none of the bars lined up, it was very uneven in appreance. I just want a even, systematic, monotone line of bars wherever I place them.

If you're up to it, try to place it in your WE, tell me if you can get it transparent. That way we'll eliminate some possible culprits. Also tell me if you know how to get rid of random terrain variation. I tried unchecking the terrain variation box and sticking to the same variation, but it still wasn't lining up.

Well thats all, thanks for reading!
View attachment Citadel_Dirt.TGA

 

[Zwiebelchen]

I'm not sure wether you can create semi-transparent ground tiles (But you can definitly create fully transparent tiles).
Have you checked the alpha channel of the TGA to be grey?
Also you should check the blp factory compression and color settings to allow grey colors in the alpha channel.
Also remember to enable/disable "sky" when placing an alpha tile in the editor, so that you have something to see behind the tile.

About the other problem it's probably a mistake in the design of the tile. Make sure the lines are at the correct spots in your blp.

 

[DiggetyBo]

Hmm, ok I new about alpha channels. But I never knew they should be grey, let me see if somehow the settings got changed and that's indeed why.

Thanks for your suggestion!

EDIT: After some experimenting nothing really panned out, once I convert the tga to blp, the transparency always disapears, no matter which settings I select.

I did have an idea though, I want to somehow over ride Citadel Dirt.blp with my modified Citadel Dirt.tga. Is there a way to edit how the mpq reads it? Maybe if it reads my tile in .tga format the partial transparency will be retained.

Anyone know?

Also I got over-zealous and tried it without making a back up, resulting in a failure to load a texture. Since citadel dirt is also a cliff tile, my map only has 1 cliff right now. I tried reverting things, but it seems that's not enough, still always only 1 cliff. why is everything so complicated..................

 

[Talavaj]

Does the file in attachment work for you ?