Alpha = colorkey

[Guest]

Hi all,I see in Imagetool under 'Alpha' that some standart 8-bit textures have a 'colorkey'. What is that and how can I achieve it? I know it's for showing e.g. fences transparent but when I load such a texture in PaintshopPro and modify it, then saving it again, this 'colorkey' is gone when loading the new texture into Imagetool.How do I get this 'colorkey' back into my new (also 8-bit) texture?Thanks in advance,Rainer

[Guest gorchi]

Hi Rainer!You can get ColorKey back if You change picture mode to indexed color.Best regards,Goran BrumenFS Slovenija 2002 teamhttp://slovenia.avsim.net

[Guest Tony_A]

Download:http://www.ptsim.com/downloads/transp.zipTransp.exe will make your backgroung colour transparent. If you happen to rework your .bmp for any reason you will have to re-run Transp.exe on it again. Tony

[Guest luissa]

Hi Rainier,The structure of an 8-bit bitmap is something like that:- header (I do not remember the size in bytes but it is a 2 figure number) with information about the file, pointer to a palette of colors, horizontal size of the bitmap (say M), vertical size of the bitmap (say N) and so on ...- palette of exactly 1024 bytes or colors (= 4 * 256) - M x N bytes (one for each pixel) representing pointers to the palette.Since a color is represented by 3 bytes, the palette of 256 colors could be represented by 768 bytes ( = 256 * 3). However, when the bitmap was definied, it was decided to alocate 4 bytes to each entry, because it is simpler to address locations that are "powers of 2".As far as I know, when PSP opens an 8-bit bitmap it ignores every 4th byte in the palette. And when saving it places a 0 in every 4th byte of the palette.Now FS interprets the 4th byte in each palette entry as a transparency level for that color. 0 means completely transparent and 255 means completely opaque. There is one minor exception to this: when ALL the 4th bytes are 0 (as in a bitmap created by PSP) FS considers the bitmap as full opaque and ImageTool will give you the report of "no alpha". On the contrary, if JUST one of the 4th bytes of the palette is different from 0, FS considers the bitmap as having an alpha channel (colorkey) and treats the 4th byte as transparency.When I have to edit a bitmap in PSP, I allways have to recreate the transparency map after finishing the edition. Goran: could you explain how we can avoid this? I use PSP_5.0.Regards, Luis

[Guest]

If you edit via Bmp2000 then the palette transparency is preserved.It will also let you change the transparency values easily.

[Guest]

Thanks to all who replied to my question.I've learned a lot again, Luis.Problem solved using the little transp.exe tool - thanks for the link, Tony!Hopefully this 8-bit transparency technology remains compatible to the next version of FS!Rainer

[Guest Tony_A]

Glad that I helped solve your problem Rainer. ALL CREDIT is due to the writer of this little program. I don't know how it works, I do know what it does. I have worked with Nova to produce some buildings with semi-transparent windows to simulate tinted glass and had all sorts of problems until I found this program. I can't find the original download to give credit where credit is due to the author. I usually keep all"Readme"s with my downloads but don't have one with Transp.exe.................If you have his name, post a thank-you to him....................Tony