Sectorgame

Alright, this has nothing to do with my Star Wars mod. But I'm having problems with these DDS files. I'm trying to make an animation using frames in *.DDS format and I'm using that *.EFF file thingy. The animation works in-game but where there should have been transparency, there isn't any. So, in other words the black background behind the actual animation is appearing and I don't want it to. Is there a specific format I'm supposed to save the *.DDS file in?

Well, it all depends of the image. There's different modes of DDS, as you probably know; nvDXT is the best to-DDS converter that I know of, so I'll recommend using that one. It's a command-line app, but you get used to that quickly.

Now, for alpha channels: DXT files are compressed, so take less memory, hard-disk and download space. They do have to be a power of two though.

- DXT1c saves without alpha channel
- DXT1a saves with one-bit alpha channel (fully transparent/fully opaque)
- DXT3 saves with 4-bit alpha channel ( I don't recommend using it, unless you know what you're doing)
- DXT5 has a full 8-bit alpha channel, allowing for soft blurs, like planet atmospheres and everything.

- uXXX saves uncompressed, without alpha channel (use u888, unless you know what you're doing)
- uXXXX saves uncompressed, with full alpha channel (use u8888, unless you know what you're doing)

Finally, don't generate mipmaps if you don't need them, that'll save you some space as well.

Oh okay, that makes more sense. Thanks, I'm using Photoshop to convert the DDS files but there's so many formats for a single extension I wasn't sure what to use.

I'm trying to make a flak explosion ani so I suppose I'd use DXT1a?

No, you'll want to use DXT1c. If weapon bitmaps, background nebulas etcetera don't have an alpha channel, the FS engine will make them transparent through brightness; black will be fully transparent, white fully opaque. So make all the frames on a fully black background, and use DXT1c compression.

Ah, okay, I'll try that, thank you for the help.