Unit icons and wire images don't need to have the alpha messed with do they?

[BNG Da BZ Fool]

I did some tga unit icons and tga wireframe images and both load/display just fine with or without the alpha transparency adjusted. This seems to make doing them a bit easier overall by bypassing a paint program that supports alpha transparencies.

Is the tga format the only one that BZ uses for icons and wireframe images? The only drag seems to be that making them is very tedious work if you have a bunch of models to do. Same thing with the unit description inf files. It does seem worth the effort though to make the units look more complete in game.

What I do to get icons and wireframes is use my modelers render to file capability to export them as 32x32 and 128x128 tga image files to special folders created for each model (I'm sure this will work with any 3d modeler that supports rendering to file options) along with creating an inf file for each model. I figured this out purely by accident the other day as my old laptop with Win ME lacks a suitable paint program for doing alpha transparency adjustments.

I also have to use Gamespace Lite on it as ME does not support my current 3d modeler Truespace 7.6; I really need to get another laptop. Until then this shortcut works well for doing unit icons and wire images. I use a paint program called Arcsoft Photoimpressions under ME to resize screengrabs (GSL doesn't support render to file) and it's rather tedious as the grab needs to be opened in MS Paint saved as bmp then opened in Photoimpressions  resized and sfinally aved as tga. It's way more easy to just use a 3d modeler that supports this to begin with. BNG.

[Nielk1]

I have started directly rendering icons and wireframes now, but, when you do so you get a full wireframe. That can be cluttered. Stock units seem to not show hidden faces in their wire images.

[BNG Da BZ Fool]

I noticed something similar with my wire frame renders; namely triagulation in standard wire render mode. However, when I adjusted the render setting to render hidden line the wire frames were very clean. Truespace, supports the use of back ground color/images in scenes, so once I realized that white was the default alpha color in GIMP I started setting the background color in TS to white (255 255 255) to get icons and wire images ready for GIMP and to remove the white alpha thingy, so that only the image itself was showing for the icons and wire image.

An interesting side note on my ME OS laptop using GSL (it don't support renders to file only to the workspace with and with an ugly watermark. What I had to do to get a decent icon wire was to open a second workspace window resized to aproximately a square maybe 320x320 and then I hit print screen and pasted the grab to MS Paint where I used the rectagular select and cut tool to copy the 320x320 2nd window and bucket fill over the 3d controls displayed in the 2nd window along with the model image. I couldn't find an ME GIMP version, or a Paint.Net version either. I did have a version of Arcsoft Photo Impressions that worked well at opening the BMP from MSP and was able to resize the image to either 32x32/128x128, but it does not support the alpha thingy. All I could do was resize and save as TGA.

After all this I saved them to the individual folders I created for each of my model files along with an INF description file. BZ doesn't seem to care one way or the other whether the icon or wire has the apha thingy set or not. Besides, I kind of prefer a solid image over a wire frame version. What really looks neat is I bucket filled the default grey backround on both the icon and wire image with bright red and the model really stands out nicely in the game.