Texture Set Templates

[tatterdemalion]

Hey uhhh is there a texture set photoshop template kicking around somewhere?

[Pfhorrest]

What do you expect to be in such a template? Texture sets are just a series of images (128x128 for the original game size, arbitrary multiples thereof for high-resolution ones if you want), each of which can be practically anything, so any template I could imagine would just be a blank square.

[treellama]

Maybe he means like this: http://simplici7y.com/items/yuge-definition-textures

[tatterdemalion]

More an array of blank squares with correct colour spaces and resolution already set.

Alternately, is there a more contemporary (i.e. not the Anvil manual) guide to creating texture sets?

[The Man]

One thing that might help is that if you use the Clouds function in Photoshop with a square canvas, it'll make a repeating pattern. (The number of pixels in each direction may have to be a power of 2 such as 128, 256, 512, etc., however - I don't have Photoshop installed so can't verify this.) That may help.

As for blank squares - make your own. Not sure what you mean by colour spaces but you can export colour tables from ShapeFusion.

[Flowers]

Alternately, is there a more contemporary (i.e. not the Anvil manual) guide to creating texture sets?

There really is no need. As stated above, a texture is simply a 128x128 image. You'll probably want said image to be seamless but there's nothing complicated about it. You can define a space to 128x128 in Paint if needed.

[tatterdemalion]

Is there a min/max # of textures per set? What colourspace should I be using?

EDIT: The making-textures part I don't need help with; it's making sure the textures are in a usable deliverable format that I'm concerned with here.

EDIT2: last time I had to futz with this stuff was trying to get a Myth2 colourmap to work so let me know if there's stuff I *don't* have to worry about.

[Flowers]

EDIT2: last time I had to futz with this stuff was trying to get a Myth2 colourmap to work so let me know if there's stuff I *don't* have to worry about.

The only issue I've personally ran into when adding new textures is that I'll have a texture created, but when I go to add it to the Shapes file it doesn't look right because the color pallet doesn't match the shade of color that my texture is. This is usually because the texture at hand uses a rather dull color while the Marathon color pallet is a bit more bright.

[ravenshining]

To be clear, you only need worry about colour tables and the 128x128 limitation inside the Shapes file, although ShapeFusion will attempt to automatically match textures to Marathon's colour space when you import a PNG or BMP. Do NOT rely on copy and paste for ShapeFusion, it doesn't work as well as Anvil.

You can also make a custom colour pallette for a texture collection, just reserve the first 3 colours for pure Blue, Magenta, and Cyan, which Marathon expects to use for 1-bit transparency.

For OpenGL replacement textures in a plugin, just use the standard 24-bit RGB or 32-bit RGBA if it's transparent.

512x512 is the sweet spot for having great looking textures without causing compatibility issues, and 1024x1024 works, too, if you don't have a massive number of them. Going to 2048x2048 or having too many 1024x1024 textures can cause problems on Windows machines, which still use 32-bit builds of Aleph One.

There is a hard maximum of 256 textures per collection. ShapeFusion will let you add more than this, but do not let it as it may lead to file corruption as it must rewrite other bytes to do so, we don't understand how AlephOne accesses them, and it will crash older utilities like Anvil.

A1 supports bump map and glow map textures in a plugin, while alpha can either be baked into a texture's alpha channel or split off into a separate mask texture. It does *not*, however, support pre-multiplied alpha very well, just straight alpha.

Landscape textures need a higher, non-square resolution. Inside the Shapesfile, use 270x512 rotated clockwise. In a plugin, 8192x3072 will give you a pixel-perfect starscape at 1080p but most people don't go that high. Landscapes obviously do not support bump maps and sadly do not support glow maps either.

Finally, once you have your textures made, you *can* save them as PNGs, but it's more efficient to use DDS with DXT 1, 3, or 5 compression. I use the GIMP DDS plugin for that, other people use Treelama's Aorta.

[tatterdemalion]

Thanks!