What you will need
You will need some graphics editing software. I use Paintshop Pro for all of my image editing. You can use MS Paint or other free image editing software, but you will be missing a large number of tools that will make the entire job easier.
There are many free image resources available. There are also some not-so-free resources out there that contain thousands of textures. To get started I suggest that you find a few repeating tiles with a brick or stone pattern. These types of images can easily be turned into dungeon walls.
The texmake program
The texmake program is used to turn your images into game usable textures. This program is available with the Devil Whisky Toolkit. The toolkit is available on the Renibister Hall website.
The size of the textures is based on a 256x256 pixel square. For textures that are two units tall (outdoor zones only) the size will be 256 pixels wide by 512 pixels tall. The tallest definable wall is four units high and will use a texture size of 256x1024. There is a limitation in the program when you attempt to define a texture that is three units tall. You must create the image as 256x512. The texmake program cannot create a texture that is 256x768, but the game will stretch a 256x512 texture out to fit onto a wall that is three units in height. This results in a loss of resolution. At this time I do not think that the texmake program will be updated to properly handle textures for walls with a height of three. All floor and ceiling textures are 256x256
When you are editing images, be sure to save all of your work in a lossless format. Saving as a simple Windows bitmap (.bmp) file is sufficient. You will only need to convert the file to JPEG once you have finished. JPEG is the only format that the texmake program will recognize.
Let's make a simple wall
Okay, so you found a simple repeating tile. The first thing you need to do is to make sure that the image is 256x256 pixels. If it's not then you need to resize it. That's it. Make sure that the file is saved in JPEG format.
http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/rickstave ... m=6e6f.jpg
Texmake is a command line program and is used in the following manner:
Code: Select all
texmake <output file name> <input file name> <alpha channel file name> [reduction factor]
To turn our test image into a game texture, use the following command:
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texmake testimage.dat testimage.jpg NULL
The file testimage.dat can now be used in the game.
Next time we'll try to make a transparent doorway.