Wood Elf Male Plate Helmet texture issue
 

So I've been tinkering with some of the textures making little changes (like fixing the Wood Elf Male Plate gloves being oriented wrong), and while trying to tackle another issue I have hit a wall.

This wall is the Wood Elf Male Plate helm's wing-looking ornament on the front of their helmet (helm3.bmp in global_chr). It very clearly looks like it's intended to have some transparency around the edges of the ornament, but there isn't. I've played around with it and modified the first index value to 'magic pink' after recoloring the intended transparent parts and modified the texture patcher .bat file to enable transparency on it, but all I get is the pink value being turned black in-game (like in the erroneously transparent textures).


Picture examples:

Before: (from texture patcher thread)
http://i.imgur.com/qTlg6Kz.png

What I see after fixing the index value to magic pink and enabling transparency:
http://i.imgur.com/7hBle9U.jpg
(Note that while the helm is tinted, that isn't whats making it black. Before I fixed the index value to the proper pink I was simply getting a slightly altered pink because of the green tint on Thorny Vine helm. I lack an un-tinted plate helm to play with)

Is there any way to enable proper transparency on the ornament of the Wood Elf Male Plate helm?

Some of the transparency issues seem to be more complex than others, and are damn near impossible to repair with the texture patcher. I never figured out why, but I stumbled on some when i was updating it. Some I ended up having to 'fix' manually in Paint Shop Pro or GIMP. Dzarn also fixed all transparency/black splotch issues on Live (idk fully how), and the model files for any bugged model can be dragged from a Live client (and added to zones where needed since they are all individually packed now and not in Zone_chr files anymore) and it will fix the issue. But that would require you to have a Live client as P99 is obviously not going to redistribute those files themselves :(

The best i can suggest is manual editing with a photo editor.

I used GIMP in color index mode to properly set up the index value for the magic pink color. So the issue wasn't in the texture at all.

I resolved the issue a few moments ago, and figured out what the issue actually was.

Apparently, in the .wld file in global_chr there is a value to hard-disable/enable transparency on the helm3 file. I used This WLD Editor Suite to peak into the file.

Particularly, I looked at the visibility value for the Half Elf helm which I know has transparency. I simply copied the visibility value from Half Elf helm (helm24) to the Wood Elf ornament file (helm3). Upon logging in I was greeted with much success:

http://i.imgur.com/c5kViQY.png

Looks nice. There an easy way for regular joes to do it?

I have a fair bit of modified files in my global_char.s3d, including high res textures so that file would be too big, but I could give somebody who can host the files the updated bmp for ornament fix (and plate glove orientation fix), and the .wld file that you could then easily just add to global_char.s3d using S3DSpy.

EDIT: I'm not sure how the transparency flag in the texture patcher stores/modifies the flag? Might need to use that patcher and modify the .bat to enabled transparency on the appropriate file.

I would get in touch with Nilbog. I'm sure he could add this to the transparency patcher that already exists to correct the same issues with Eye of Zomm and Half-Elf visors. BTW, great work.

Haven't used the texture patcher myself and not sure exactly how it goes about things either, but I would try removing this line from the .bat

and changing this line

to this

Just moving helm3.bmp from "fix black spots" mode to "add transparency" mode (assuming that's what "rt" and "mp" refer to respectively, whatever they're supposed to stand for).

Sorry I wasn't really clear. I had to do that myself to make this work. What I was curious about is how the transparency flag was stored... If it was stored on the image file itself or in the s3d file. If it is (probably) stored on the s3d then they would have to run a modified bat.

I was more lazy and when I modified the bat file all I did was changed "set rt_global_chr=helm3.bmp" to "set mp_global_chr=helm3.bmp", instead of adding it to the end of another line.

Oh, I must've misread that part.

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The transparency flags are in the .wld file as you sort of already demonstrated above. The visibility flag is it. You can set transparency (I'd call it "masking", there are other transparency modes) on textures that aren't supposed to be transparent at all and you'll end up with a texture with random holes in it. My assumption is that it grabs the first or last index color in the palette and uses that for the transparent color (assuming BMP -- PNG and JPEG textures also work in addition to DDS, I can't remember if they use the alpha value to exclude pixels under a certain threshold or not, but that would be the expected way to do it). It's usually the color in the lower-right corner as well, but not always... (None of the EQ BMP files appear to use the BMP extensions that allow designating a color for transparency, as far as I've seen; the client just looks in some standard place.)

A single texture can actually have multiple separate visibility flags applied to it for different models, but I don't think the texture patcher is sophisticated enough to distinguish between different instances of the same texture in the .wld file. Hence why it opens up a hole in the back of female human plate helms, apparently.
</spam>

This is the part that was interesting to me. The patcher flips some flag somewhere to enable or disable transparency. But simply changing to 'enable' it for the wood elf hat ornament didn't actually enable any transparency. I only achieved that transparency when I went into the .wld file and changed it there.

At the same time though, the patcher did change something. Without it being changed there to allow transparency the ornament had a pink outline I put there. When I ran the adjusted patcher .bat the pink turned black (like other textures falsely tagged to be transparent).

Tinkering around with it after I got it working I found that the only way the ornament had the transparency in the above picture was to have the .wld modified, AND to have the patcher flag it as transparency allowed. Either of these not in-place and the transparency was broken. This implies theres another flag somewhere that the patcher modified... I'd be curious to know what flag the patcher is actually changing and where it is.