Clarification on Water Alpha tiles

[pstrzel]

For the water mask the tutorial says "Save the file as a000.bmp". This confuses me, since tiles are numbered with 4 digits. In the case of the scenery I'm working the "Terragen" tiles extend between 0000.BMP and 1414.BMP (photorealistic). Does that mean that my water mask tiles should be a0000.BMP through a1414.BMP?
Thanks.

[Micheal]

I was just about to post this same thing. There is a typo. It should be a0000.bmp, a0001.bmp, a0100.bmp, and a0101.bmp. Just place an "a" in front of the original digits.

[Xavier]

Hi all,

The water alpha tiles are 8192 x8192 pixels 32 bits (256 Mo) or the same size of the bmp files.

They are numbered as the bmp tiles but with the suffix "a ", example "a0104" and must be placed in the folder.

Condor2/Landscapes/YourScenery/Working/Terragen/Textures/

There is no water alpha effect with white colour, and water alpha effect with black colour.

All the tiles (Terragen tiles XXYY.bmp and WaterAlpha tiles aXXYY must be present (missing WaterAlpha tiles must be white tiles) before starting WaterAlpha.exe.

CAUTION
After executing once WaterAlpha.exe, if you made some correction on one or several tiles you must process in that way, before starting again the WalerAlpha.exe:

Eliminate all the patches tXXYY.bmp and all the dds patches of the associated DDS directory in the

Condor2/Landscapes/YourScenery/Working/Terragen/Textures/ folder.

Lasting time 4 h per 50 Terragen Tiles.

Good Luck

[JBr]

Actually, if I recall correctly, you don't need alpha tiles for texture tiles without any water. So you can process all the tiles for your scenery, but only add few alpha tiles for some of the textures. WaterAlpha just uses the texture and doesn't add any alpha channel in case of missing alpha file. Also, you can process one tile only, so if you just put eg. 0105.bmp and a0105.bmp, it should give you proper texture tile with alpha and if you let it process with nvdxt, it should also give you the patches belonging just to this tile.

[pstrzel]

That's how I assumed it works. Thank you all for clarifications.

[Andy1248]

I note that the 'Water Alpha Tool' only works for tiles sized 8192 although other sizes are selectable on the tool.

However selecting a size other than 8192 does not work.

For tiles that are just water this does increase the memory size of the scenery.

Am I doing something wrong or can only 8192 tiles be processed?

[JBr]

I have to check the source codes. Maybe tonight.

[pstrzel]

I'm not sure where I went wrong. Ndvxt.exe is in the same directory as WaterAlpha.exe, but the tool did not convert BMP to dds. Here's a screenshot of what it did, but all files in the Terragen/Textures/dds directory are still BMP.

WaterAlpha_DDS_conversion.png

EDIT:
I decided to rerun the nvdxt.exe command line, change the outdir to the final textures directory (Condor2\Landscapes\Logan2\Textures) and it seems to be working now.