How to change backgrounds for screens?

[Devotion]

How would I go about changing backgrounds for the main menu screen and other screens such as the one that displays character stats for WFAS? 

 

[Cozur]

Edit them using a program such as Photoshop.

 

[gokiller]

Look for the file names in your texture folder, they should be quite obvious. Than just eddit them with Photoshop, paint, Gimp or any other edditing program and save them as the same format (.dds) in the texture folder.

 

[Devotion]

Okay, thanks!

Just out of curiosity...is there a file with code that directs the use of a background texture that can be edited? Or is that hard coded?

 

[Somebody]

Just create textures with the same name (and aspect ratio so they aren't smushed) and drop them in your mod's Textures folder. It's hardcoded but easily overriden. In OpenBRF do a search for menu, screen, window etc. under textures.

 

[Devotion]

Ah, I see. Thank you

 

[Swyter]

Just create textures with the same name (and aspect ratio so they aren't smushed) and drop them in your mod's Textures folder. It's hardcoded but easily overriden. In OpenBRF do a search for menu, screen, window etc. under textures.

It's hardcoded in the sense that the game loads a set of predefined meshes by name.
But in Warband you can override what's inside the

core_ui_meshes.brf

file and company.

The hacky DDS override is now lazy and a thing of the past.
Do it right and create your own replacement meshes, materials, UVs, and textures.

 

[GunFred]

I have been doing exactly this lately but I have another problem. My versions lose their transperancy and the black surrounding remain black. How come and is there a way for mine to become transparent as well?

 

[Swyter]

I have been doing exactly this lately but I have another problem. My versions lose their transperancy and the black surrounding remain black. How come and is there a way for mine to become transparent as well?

Yeah. Edit their materials. Do a copy of

core_materials.brf

inside your

<mb root>/modules/<your mod>/Resource

folder, open it with OpenBRF and tweak the alpha flags to use alpha blending or straight alpha test.

If still doesn't work, it may be a problem of not saving the alpha channel of your textures correctly. Bad DXT export method or something else. This is a good program for previewing DDS textures and their individual channels and mipmaps without much fuss.

 

[GunFred]

Thank you very much Swyter. I always saved my dds files with the default settings which included "DXT1 RGB 4 bpp | no alpha". Noticing the "DXT" which you had mentioned I tried "DXT1 ARGB 4 bpp | 1 bit alpha" which cleaned away most of the black. And then "DXT3 ARGB 8 bpp | explicit alpha" worked perfectly.

I have gotten a little more knowledgable today, thanks. 

 

[Whiticus]

I would use Gimp for editing the .DDS files it got an addon for it to save them like .DDS

隐藏

http://www.gimp.org

overall its easy to use I prefer using Adobe Photo shop CC but that aint free..

 

[Marko͘]

GIMP has a very ****ty DDS compression. Export to PNG, then use Paint.net to convert to DDS

 

[Lav]

GIMP has a very ****ty DDS compression. Export to PNG, then use Paint.net to convert to DDS

Erm, what exactly is wrong with GIMP? It seems to work fine for me.

 

[Marko͘]

Nothing wrong with it in terms of drawing images and stuff, but try not to save to .dds with the GIMP plugin, it has a poor compression rate and it takes up more space. Rather export it as a .png from GIMP, then open the .png in paint.net and just save again as a .dds

 

[Lav]

Nothing wrong with it in terms of drawing images and stuff, but try not to save to .dds with the GIMP plugin, it has a poor compression rate and it takes up more space. Rather export it as a .png from GIMP, then open the .png in paint.net and just save again as a .dds

Okaaaay... So I took a project of 512*512 heraldic texture in GIMP, exported it as PNG, opened it in Paint.NET and re-saved as DDS file. Resulting size: 262 Kb.

Then I exported the same file as DDS from GIMP. Resulting file size: 349 Kb. Pretty ouch, yeah? Except...

Then I exported it from GIMP as DDS without mipmaps. Resulting size: 262 Kb.

So the question remains: what's so great about Paint.NET except it's inability to generate mipmaps for texture files?

 

[Marko͘]

It does generate if you click on the option, there should be a checkbox.

 

[Lav]

It does generate if you click on the option, there should be a checkbox.

There wasn't for me. But the point is: both GIMP and Paint.NET generated the files of identical size when saving the main image. So if they both generate a file with mipmaps, the files should still have the same size. So why bother with all this exporting-reopening-resaving thing when GIMP DDS plugin apparently works just fine?

 

[Marko͘]

I wasn't the first to mention this so why don't we ask everyone 
Also paint.net comes with an integrated .dds saving option, you need a plugin for GIMP, right?

 

[Swyter]

It does generate if you click on the option, there should be a checkbox.

There wasn't for me. But the point is: both GIMP and Paint.NET generated the files of identical size when saving the main image. So if they both generate a file with mipmaps, the files should still have the same size. So why bother with all this exporting-reopening-resaving thing when GIMP DDS plugin apparently works just fine?

The thing is that the DXT/S3TC compression used by the DirectX Draw Surface texture format compresses the image in blocks of 4x4 pixels, and it's completely predictable.

That means that for the same width x height, channels and mipmaps you get always the same size, the difference between the various DXT/S3TC compressors out there is their quality, some of them quantize better/use better or smarter algorithms and the resulting image using the same compression looks much much better, or just not as degraded.

More here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S3_Texture_Compression

 

[Whiticus]

I wasn't the first to mention this so why don't we ask everyone 
Also paint.net comes with an integrated .dds saving option, you need a plugin for GIMP, right?

Yes Gimp need and Plugin sir, If you are going to compare Gimp with Paint.net than I would say Gimp is the winner....
I dont know if you are familiar with Photoshoping but try to make something nice with it.... Good luck with that..
Gimp you can do almost the samet hings as in Adobe Photoshop CC exept Gimp is free.

And like Lav says Gimp and paint.net just does the same if we look at DDS compression.

But for sake of the topic we should help this guy out with his question instead of argue witch program is better

Ya'll know Iam sayin