What's the deal with transparent textures

[Törni 0]

I have always problems when I try to make a 2D surface with some transparent or semi-transparent parts with alpha channel. ArmA seems to make either entire surface semi-transparent or no transparency at all.

I tried Photoshop plug, converting from targa with textview, but so far random success. It sometimes works, but sometimes it will not succeed no matter what. Is there a "proper" way to use alpha with ArmA? There seems to be more issues if the texture itself is very dark or has nearly black areas.

[Jackal326 1158]

Make sure you have the correct _extension on the end of the texture (before the .PAA/.PAC file type extension). Try saving the file as whatever_ca.paa using TexView2 and see if that helps. Unless told otherwise, TexView2 will usually save the file "type" as a _co.paa which don't support alpha channels, hence them either working incorrectly, or not at all. For more info refer to the BIS Wiki.

[modemmaik 53]

I think that you refer to the effect using a transparent textur including a material. Without material, it behaves more or less like OFP.

You may check the URAL's / 5Ton's windows included in the BI samples for transparent textures plus materials example.

Btw, I use png-files as source plus texview2 to generate such .paa files.

[eddyd 0]

if you saved in tga file , make sure you saved in 32 bits of pixels in photoshop or go not work in texview2

[da12thMonkey 1943]

Jackal is correct.

Make sure you convert the new texture from the original .tga to change from _ca/_co.paa to _co/_ca.paa though. Simply changing the filename of the .paa in Windows wont work since the way ArmA renders the texture is written in by texview, during the conversion process.

[modemmaik 53]

I just remember what seems to be a "workaround" by BI.

When you check the optike_tank_driver.p3d, you may notice some surfaces that have a texture defined as

<table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tr><td>Code Sample </td></tr><tr><td id="CODE">#(argb,8,8,3)color(0,0,0,1.0,co)

This way, you can avoid the "semi-transparent" textures because those areas are blocked-out in the transparent view.

BR,

mike