Problem with sprite editing
 

I have a problem editing sprites. They look ok in photoshop, but when loading them into the game, there are sometimes black around them, they have a tiny black border and/or the pink shaddow doesnt seem to work. I use layers, melt them down to one and then save them as .tga. Attached in an archive with two units, especially the angel one doesnt work.

In addition, it seems my tga (64x64) are not scaled right, they look kind of "fat" ingame, while they look just ok when editing them.

http://rapidshare.com/files/372249774/new.rar.html

Re: Problem with sprite editing
 

The shadow must be 255 0 255.

Anything you want to be transparent must be 0 0 0.

Re: Problem with sprite editing
 

RE: the "fat" graphics - yes, I've noticed that too. The in-game scaling does not appear to be 1:1. I don't have any suggestion other than eyeballing it - it's a particular problem if you want a fairly accurate geometric shape (as you notice when it's "off" more easily.) Note that viewing in the recruitment screen is a relatively quick way to judge, and you can get the dimensions worked out prior to fiddling with the fine detail.

Re: Problem with sprite editing
 

If you pick a basic resolution and turn filtering off the sprites appear exactly as they are in the graphical editing program of your choice.

So I don't think the game is stretching sprites, it's just a matter of resolution.

Re: Problem with sprite editing
 

What do you consider a "basic resolution"? I use 1680 x 1050, which is my monitor's native resolution (both in-game via the visual preferences, and in my OS.) I still see the "fat sprites" effect (not very noticeable, except when doing something like a perfect sphere.)

Re: Problem with sprite editing
 

A non widescreen resolution.

Dom3 doesn't support widescreen it seems to me.

Re: Problem with sprite editing
 

In the Drowned image, I see faint stray pixels around the sprite -- be sure to use, say, the magic wand tool to find and remove those (if not wanted).

As for the angel one (and possibly the drowned one too -- I didn't check it for this), the problem is that you've got a dark "halo" of nearly-black pixels around it. Most of these should be deleted, but some require a judgment call -- if removing them destroys a certain element of detail that is good, then use the H/S/L or Brightness/Contrast tools to lighten them (and possibly increase color saturation) a bit.

Edge pixels under a certain threshold of lightness will show up in-game darker than you'd expect from looking at it in an editor. Unless you specifically want an area quite dark, you need to have the edges fairly light -- maybe just a bit darker than the main color. It took a bit of dinking around for me to get a sense of it, but you can reduce a lot of the pixel-by-pixel work by using the Magic Wand tool (Fuzzy Select in GIMP) with a tolerance (threshold in GIMP) of, say, 5 or 10. Experiment to get a good result.

Attached image should show you what I mean.

Re: Problem with sprite editing
 

Ill try, thanks for your help guys. After cleaning the angel up, it looks better ingame, it was indeed a a faint black halo around it, probably from the copy/paste and smudge job.

Re: Problem with sprite editing
 

I don't know if this will help, but one little trick I found very helpful for smudging or smearing or any sort of thing like that is to use the hand-drawing select tool (I haven't reinstalled it since the HD crash, so I can't remember the exact term it used) to carefully select only the area you want to smudge/burn/whatever. That way, you can't push color into the surrounding pixels even if you try.

(Another trick in a situation where you only want to avoid tainting the black background is to use the magic wand to select the black background color with 0 tolerance, then Selection->Invert.

Don't know if those tips are helpful, but thought I'd throw 'em out there anyway.

Re: Problem with sprite editing
 

Ack! So the game doesn't actually support the listed resolutions natively??

I just tried running in windowed mode with explicit dimensions specified, and apparently I'm used to the wider fonts, etc. because now everything looks squished :(

So, basically, if you're running a 4x3 resolution, graphics are "normal", but everything else is off by whatever the scaling factor is..I also tried 1280 x 1024 (5x4, resolution of my other monitor), and that makes things *narrower*. Not at all what I would expect. This should be in the modding manual, at least (if not the game manual.)

Hrmph...