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====== Texture Tutorial ======

How to create your own textures (tiles).

Tiles comes in groups of 16. If you have more than 16, you need to divide them to other group. Resolution of default H tile is 128 x 128, 8bit 256 colors but you can do also [[http://tactical.nekromantix.com/f4/512tiles.php|512 res]] tiles. In group of 16 tiles, they all share the same Color Palette. Color Palette in default tile has colors 252 - 255 for city night lightning effect. For example you use normal daytime colors for the 252-255 color indexes, sprinkle these colors along the tile where you want the night lighting to show up, then at night time they will be shown as these values:

<code>
position 252 will turn to colour 115,171,155 (RGB values)
position 253 will turn to colour 183,127,183 (RGB values)
position 254 will turn to colour 171,179,139 (RGB values)
position 255 will turn to colour 171,171,171 (RGB values)
</code>

**Ranger's Notes**
This all sounds pretty easy but it isn't.  You can try KingGeorge's method of saving all your tiles into a mega graphics and reducing the color pallete and converting the last 4 pallete colors to white.  However, experience has shown that there are invaribly conflicts with the colors.  Here is an alternative way that worked for me.  First, when create a tile set - the set will have a specific color pallet.  In the original form you will have 256 colors.  These 256 colors need to then be reduced down to 252 colors to leave a space for the last four color in the pallete.  How to do this.  The easiest way is find one of the many color pallete management tools that are commericially available.  Most of these will allow you to edit the color palette of an image and allow to export parts of a pallete, import colors, organize colors, and even include or exclude colors.  The problem with night colors is these colors need to be unique within the pallet.  I.e. if you have any tile which uses any of the four desiganted night colors in any position other than exactly where you intended to "sprinkle" night lights - those pixels will also be "lit" at night.  Therefore, you will need to ensure that you color palette doesn't include any of the night colors in any of the other 252 color positions.  How to do this?  This is pretty easy - first you need to combine all 16 of your tiles into one master composite tile.  Typically most tile makers will make their tile set using 16million colors.  Then you reduce this to 252 colors in your pallet.  Next you need to export the pallete and then look at each of the 252 colors and verify that the color isn't one of the 4 night colors.  This process is pretty fast becasuse you can eliminate most colors by using the first color - if you find any exact matches simple adjust your the pallet color by one single number up or down - this will then make the color virtually the same but will avoid the exact match needed for the night colors.  Now, you have a clean color pallete for you tile set.  Next, export your color palette to one of the color pallete management tools.  Then manually add the four night colors to complete your 256 color pallete.  This pallet can then be used by the SPTinstall in the process of converting *.pcx tiles into the day and night DDS tiles used by RV, Cobra, etc.  If you using AF then the conversion to DDS doesn't apply.


====== Adding New Textures ======

Tile information is located at texture.bin, each tile "set" (or group) contains maximum of 16 tiles.Tiling filename Microprose "standard" we all should be using is using the following rules:

<1*resolution> <4*name> <3*direction> .pcx\\
resolution is as above, H, M, L, or T name is just a name - but only 4 chars. Direction is used for tiling.

The first two give the set, e.g., 00 for beach section etc. The next one is a HEX number 0-15 with 10=A, 11=B etc. You make this up by using the direction of the "other feature" included in the tile. So, say its a forest road.

You do the following

Add 1 if there is a road going out of the square to the north\\
Add 2 if there is one going east\\
Add 4 if there is one going south\\
Add 8 if there is one going west\\
So - with no roads - you get 000\\
with a road coming from the north, but ending in this square you get 001\\
A road going east-west you would get 2+8 = 10 = A => 00A\\
A T junction pointing south would be 2 + 4 + 8 = 14 => 00D\\
A crossroads would be 1+2+4+8 = 15 = 00F\\

Similar for coast - where land is the "other" factor, or say a forest/plains tile - use forests as the main, and the "plains" as the "other" factor.

When we have made new tiles to add, then use tbin2txt.pl to produce the text file from default korean texture.bin like:

<code>
./tbin2txt.pl texture.bin >korea.txt
</code>

in the end of korea.txt, add your own textures like:
<code>
SET 4
HDYNE100.pcx 0 0
HDYNE101.pcx 0 0
HDYNE102.pcx 0 0
HDYNE103.pcx 0 0
HDYNE104.pcx 0 0
HDYNE105.pcx 0 0
HDYNE106.pcx 0 0
HDYNE107.pcx 0 0
HDYNE108.pcx 0 0
ENDSET
</code>

Now were ready to create the mytextures.bin, use the perl txt2bin.pl with command line: 

<code>
./txt2bin.pl korea.txt >mytextures.bin
</code>

To create M, L and T tiles we suggest you run the runtiles batch file we created. Inside the zip is readme.txt which should guide your tile creation process. After you have made M, L and T tiles from the original H tiles, just add your new .pcx tiles to texture.zip, copy new texture.bin (mytextures.bin) to the texture dir and fire up Tinstall.exe, SPTinstal.exe or FFTinstall to rebuild terrain with new textures as it creates new fartiles.raw file. (tbin2txt.pl and txt2bin.pl scripts in [[http://tactical.nekromantix.com/f4/downloads.php|here]]).

Thats it, good luck. 


====== Making fartiles.pal ======

Use Paint Shop Pro to create one 16 million color image where you add one tile from every tile-set, then reduce the colors to 256 and save the palette to for example "new-fartiles.pal" filename, also save the image to be used later. This image should be then resized for example to 16x16 resolution to make it nice and small. Then take the mkpal.pl perl script and run it like this:

<code>
./mkpal.pl new-fartiles.pal >fartiles.pal
</code>

Now you have brand new fartiles.pal file. The new-fartiles.pal PSP palette's image is also to be used in the T tiles color palette.

For Theater Developers - if you plan to create a theater that recommends a setting of never letting fartiles kick in - then the concerns for fartiles shouldn't be an issue.  To our knowledge no theater has ever been created without consideration of using fartiles.  It is recommened that you always include fartiles in planning terrain tiles/terrain building.




====== Making M, L and T tiles ======

Download the Runtiles packet, unpack the Runtiles.v1.1.rar to \temp directory (any dir, we refer to \temp). Copy all your new H tiles to \temp directory, then place the fartile palette PCX file (new-fartiles.pal image) to the same dir. Rename the fartile pcx file for "xfartile.pcx". You must start 4dos.com to get the for loop support, basic windows command.com will not support this. Just run 4dos.com in your windows dos screen. You know when the 4dos is running when you see something like this:

<code>
4DOS EMS swapping initialized (144K)
4DOS running under Windows 3 in 386 enhanced mode

4DOS 5.0 DOS 7.10
Copyright 1988-1994 Rex Conn & JP Software Inc. All Rights Reserved
</code>

Of course if you already are using 4dos, you dont need to re-run it. Then run "runtiles.bat" from your 4dos.com DOS screen and sit back. if all goes well, after the process you should have the original H tiles and also M, L and T tiles, where T tiles use the color palette from xfartile.pcx image.

Again, if you find something wrong with this tutorial, or can provide some information to improve it... please email us!

**Ranger's Notes**
A few other notes to keep in mind.  The original F4.exe used the L-tile as the actual source for the color pallete for a tile set.  Therefore there is some ability to adjust the color pallete of all the tiles by simply chaning the color pallete of the M-tiles.  This may hold true for BMS and later exe and may be part of the principle of how SeasonSwitcher works.  Also, Widowmaker demonstrated that it was possible to copy the H-tiles and put them in the M and L- tile positions without adverse affect on framerate.  Widowmaker called this process the High Altitude Fix - which in effect increase the tile resolution of the lower lower tiles.  Users can accomplish this same effect by copying the the H-tiles and then running a batch rename to change the H*.pcx to L*.pcx and H*.pcx to M*.pcx.  This will also reduce some of the edge to edge issues associated with tiles.  In short, you can get by with just using H-tiles.

====== Word for texture creators ======

When you are creating new textures, please make sure you will make full terrain type tile-sets at once, its simply too troublesome to finish just some tiles and go back to create "missing" tiles weeks later when they are needed. So what are full terrain tile-sets? Lets assume you have desert, vegetation and mountain terrain types... so our Full terrain tile-sets contains these elements:\\
[Desert textures]\\
- basic terrain type tile(s).\\
- road/river/city tiles.\\
- coast tiles.\\
- transition tiles to vegetation and mountain types, including roads/rivers/coast/default (no features).

[Vegetation textures]\\
- basic terrain type tile(s).\\
- road/river/city tiles.\\
- coast tiles.\\
- transition tiles to desert and mountain types, including roads/rivers/coast/default (no features).

[Mountain textures]\\
- basic terrain type tile(s).\\
- road/river/city tiles.\\
- coast tiles, if required for mountain, be very careful when checking this.\\
- transition tiles to desert and vegetation types, including roads/rivers/coast?/default (no features).

You see, you gotta be thorough with the tiles that you remember include everything, its not that simple to add tiles to the texture.bin later when you have done screw up earlier. Now that you have all textures created, you must use the Microprose "standard" for naming the tiles if you want to keep CATE and Terrainview working with them. When you have standard tile-set made, it only takes less than 60 seconds for CATE to tile 16000 segments with your tiles! No standard == do it yourself...

====== PCX To DDS Conversion ======

To convert your old pcx (Original Falcon and AF) tiles into DDS format what RV and OF uses, there is few options. Read more about it [[falcon4:textures:pcx2dds|here]].

====== Installing Skins ======

How to apply aircraft/vehicles skin textures in all F4 versions.

**F4AF**

In AF you should use TexInstall.exe to apply the <number>.bmp skins into the .tex file directly. Example of it looks like this:

<code>
TexInstall.exe <number>.bmp
</code>

The number being the aircraft CT number of course.

**RV / OF**

In the new DDS texture format falcon versions the whole skin installing method has changed, now you need to create directory "Theaters\<THEATER>\**terrdata\objects\KoreaObj\**" and place all your //<number>.dds// skin files into this directory. Again, the number being the aircraft CT number.

====== Tile Creation Tutorials ======

Here is couple of tile creation tutorials.

[[falcon4:textures:tiletutzaggy|Zaggy's Tile Meistering Tutorial]] by Zaggy

[[falcon4:textures:tiletutroad|Road Tile Creation]] by rom

[[falcon4:textures:tiletutriver|Tutorial for drawing a river on a given tile]] by rom

[[falcon4:textures:tiletutrgb2pcx|How to convert the RGB images back to PCX]]

[[falcon4:textures:tiletuttilable|Creating a full tilable sets]]

[[falcon4:textures:tiletut512sat|Creating 512 Tiles from sat images]] by Kinggeorge


====== Aircraft Skin Creation Tutorials ======

These tutorials are by [[http://www.simmersworld.com/~openskin/tuts.htm|OpenSkins]], much credit to Zaggy how granted us permission to provide the tutorials here.

[[falcon4:textures:skinoverview|How-To: skin-making overview]] by Zaggy 15/06/04\\
Goes through the skin making process from Extracting the wireframes from LOD Editor right through to converting to DDS files for BMS 2.0. By no means the definitive guide to making skins, but simply ges through the methodology and techniques used to come up with the end product.

[[falcon4:textures:aboutdds|About DDS Files]] by Zaggy 25/06/04\\
A brief description of answers to the most common things new skinners want to know about DDS fles, what they are, where they go and how they're made. Should be of use to you out there who are attempting your first skin or mod.

[[falcon4:textures:ps_layers1|About Photoshop Layers 1]] by Zaggy 26/06/04\\
First part of a short series of planned articles on implementing Photoshop Layers and using them in an effective manner when dealing with complex graphics such as skinning. More parts and techniques to come shortly.

[[falcon4:textures:weatherndepth|Basic Weathering and Depth]] by Zaggy 04/07/04\\
Covers the basic techniques used to weather an aircraft, stains, grime, depth and shadings, etc.

[[falcon4:textures:ddsskins|DDS Skin Tutorial]] by JanHas\\
How to create aircraft skins in PhotoShop.

See also how to create [[:editing_alpha_channel|Alpha Channel]] for your texture.
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