[--Steve-O--]

i downloaded and played the Earth Defense Demo love that normal mapping, but here's the hitch.
when ever i try to create the data folders so i can pop in one of my fighters to tinker with with the whole normal mapping deal things go baddly.

heres whats going in.
wraith.pof   (i have had absolutly no problems with this model in 3.6.9)
wraith DDS maps DXT3 compression (normal map at first, ditched it to get things to work)
wraith.tbm  (modified to make use of ED weapons only and shield icons for testing)
all go to respective folders data/maps,models,tables

what happens is this.
in the techroom the wraith and most of the other models are black...textureless voids, you can still see the shape of it spinning around though. same with load out. when i try to commit and fly the mission the game just scrams, end of story. i tried yanking out the ships table and popping the wraith into it to ditch the .tbm...same deal. so yeah...if i dont tinker with things ED works like a charm. i dont get this. i know ED is using a newer build than 3.6.9 i'm just not sure which one it is and if it has certain rules one must follow to add stuff into it.

so yeah. its not major, i just want to know what im doing or introducing that is wrong

[Nuke]

you should be using dxt5 for maps with alpha, dxt1 for maps with no alpha and dxt5_nm for normal maps. also they need to go in freespace2\moddir\data\maps. what you got is a case of freespace cant find your textures.

[--Steve-O--]

so for additions to a stand alone mod, all the import files need a mod/data folder and imports cant be just dumped into a data folder in the root dir like in 3.6.9? thats funky. i'll give that a whirl though. and report back

what can be used to write DXT5_NM maps? the stand alone util i have only writes up to DXT5. i D/L the nvdxt program and was faced with the fact that i havn't had to do anything that resembled DOS work for 9 or so years now. so its kind of a jumble to me.

[Nuke]

you can just stick data in the data dir, but its not a good idea. better get used to using mod inis and mod dirs. it makes it easyer to mod and to release mods and you dont cripple the game, multi, or other mods.

if you cant save a dxt5_nm, i think what you can do is take the blue channel (or was it green?) and stick it into alpha, take the red channel (i think) and stick it into red, green, and blue. i think thats how it works. its the same format, it just makes best use of the channels which degrade the least (green and alpha). thats how it works, though im not sure which channel goes where.

*edit*
just looked it up it seems red goes into alpha and green goes into the other 3 channels, so make a regular tangent space normal map, then move the channels around and save. nvidia seems to recomend blacking out the red and blue channels (once the red has been moved to alpha), but for some reason their photoshop plugin doesnt do this.