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Before we get started. There are some simple things to go over. First of this entire tutorial
Has been written for the program PSP 6.0 because of all the 14 year olds who can't get mommy
and daddy to pay for the higher end programs such as Photoshop. You can download a 30-day free
trial at JASC.COM. If you do have one of those higher
end programs most of them work the same a lot of this will carry over. Below is a list of
some short cuts that you will be using. They are VERY useful and cut out a lot of time.
Creating your textures
Adding the correct colors (pallette) First we will go over how to CORRECTLY ad the palette to the textures you have made. REMEMBER you have to ad the palette to your textures or they will freak out when you look at them in your arena! It is common knowledge that the palette.bmp that comes with the cityset texture library is the palette you are supposed to use when applying the correct colors. This isn't entirely true, nor is it true that the textures have to have 256 colors. It's actually a little less. The palette.bmp file contains ALL the color information for the textures AND the console graphics on your screen IE radar, chat screen, throttle indicator ECT. I goofed around with the palette.bmp file and made one that will be used for applying the correct colors to the textures you can download this file below. (Do that now). Save this file SOME WHERE ELSE other than where your pallette.bmp file is in your cityset directory. If you use the following file to export maps they will come out all freaky. I learned the hard way. palette.bmp (do not over write the pallette.bmp file in cityset root) Ok the first thing you need to do is open the file you just downloaded into you graphics program (PSP 6.0). Now open a texture that you have made that hasn't had the palette added to it. The first thing you need to do is to put the entire texture that you have created into your clipboard. Do this by selecting the image, hit the shortcut CTRL+A, and then hit CTRL+C. You now have your texture in the clipboard. Now select the palette.bmp image that you downloaded above and hit CTRL+E. This takes the clipboard and pastes it into the image palette.bmp; the image you've just pasted may look a little different hopefully not too much. You now have an image called palette.bmp with your texture pasted into it. You now have to save the texture as a different name other than palette.bmp (you don't want to overwrite it). If you have any questions about the above text gimme an e-mail I'll try to explain what I can. Cutting your picture into textures Ok so you have a big ole picture you want to cut into textures? Well with PSP 6.0 it's easy!! Ok first what you need to do is make the Height and width divisible by 64. (Who said you'd never use that math class) How I do this is open my graphic I want. Then hit SHIFT+I this brings up the information on the graphic. Find out how many pixels high and wide it is (write em down)
 Ok with the above information we have an image that's 368 pixels wide and 144 pixels tall. Divide the height (368) by 64 you come up with 5.75 well ya can't have 3/4 of a texture so we need to make that width 6 textures wide (384 pixels) a little bigger than the image your gonna cut up. Do the same thing with the height. You should come up with the dimensions of 384 X 192 witch are both divisible by 64. NOW create a new image with those dimensions. By going to the menu File and then New or hitting the shortcut CTRL+N Now select the image to be cut up and hit CTRL+A, and then hit CTRL+C you now have the image to be cut up in your clipboard. Now select the newly created image and hit CTRL+E to paste it. You may have to touch up the image a bit due to the different dimensions. OK now you have an image with your width and height that are divisible by 64 what you do next is the easy part! This is made easy by PSP's status bar pictured below.
Ok now what you need to do is zoom in on your graphic 2 or 3 times and select a bright contrasting FREAKY background color in the color picker you'll see why. Then select your rectangular masking tool and starting with the upper left hand corner of your image mask the first block using the status bar below being careful to get it to 64 X 64 as pictured above. Ok once you have the first block masked off hit CTRL+X This takes away from the image and adds what WAS in the mask to your clipboard! Now all you have to do is hit CTRL+V This creates the first texture! Now using the cut out portion and the status bar you have what you need to cut the rest of the textures out of your image! I'd save all the images as you create them but be sure to add the palette to them before putting them into your texture set library. |
