I am in the process of making edits to the Shivan ships' glowmaps, using GIMP. When I opened the Dragon's .dds glowmap, I noticed a few white speckles on the image. When I saved it and put it in my mod folder - the white speckles appeared on the ship itself.
I figured, what the hell, people probably will not be looking that closely at the Dragon anyway.
Next ship on the list is the Basilisk. I open its glowmap, and suddenly, all the glowing green bits have tiny speckles EVERYWHERE. I made my edits, saved it, and the result was just as terrible as I had predicted.
Because these are on a glowmap, they make tiny glowing white dots everywhere on the ship.
The distribution of the white dots is not entirely random either. They occur right at the boundary between solid black and really dim glows. I zoomed WAY into the dots, and discovered that they are actually pieces of the image that are completely transparent (the checkered background). Almost like the compression was too aggressive and stripped tiny bits of the image out.
I'm not really familiar enough with image editing to get a brush to color over transparent stuff only and leave the rest of the image alone. And I'm not familiar enough with the inner workings of .vp files, the intricacies of .dds, or the guts of GIMP to do anything but guess at what might be going wrong.
Has anyone encountered this problem before?