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Creating textures for scenes

Creating scene textures is a similar process to creating model textures

Step One: Download the base texture set

The base texture set contains the texture files used in the scene. Download the texture set for the Yacht.

Step Two: Install the texture set

Double click on the .exe file you downloaded in Step One. This will install a zip archive file to your “mod” folder.

Step Three: Activate the texture set

  1. Run the game
  2. Go to the Settings tab
  3. Turn on the texture set (note: you may not be able to see the full name of the zip archive. You can rename the zip file in the “mod” folder if this makes it easier. Otherwise, take your best guess.
  4. This will unzip the textures into a folder underneath the “ActiveMod” folder
  5. E.g. “ActiveMod\thriXXX_TexturePack_Yacht.zip”

Step Four: Modify a Texture

  1. Look at the textures that were unzipped in the previous step and pick one to modify
  2. Run your image editor (E.g. Photoshop, Gimp, etc)
  3. Load up the image and make some changes
  4. save it over the original image

(note: you can always get the default images out of the .zip archive file in the “mod” folder if you need them)

Its location depends on either your installation directory (Windows XP) or your windows user directory (Windows Vista). The easiest way to find it, is to check the start menu for the “Open mod folder” shortcut.

Step Five: View your new texture in-game

  1. load up the scene. It will be show up as a clone of the original set with the name of the texture mod
  2. locate your modified texture

Step Six: Rinse and Repeat

You can use ALT+R to reload the textures in the scene so you don't have to exit and restart. That makes it really handy to try different things and see the results.

Tips and Tricks

What are those .txf files for?

NOTE: Be careful if you edit the txf files. If you mess them up you will get unpredictable drawing behaviour. You can always revert to the file in the zip archive if you need to

The txf files determine how the texture will be blended in the scene. If you are familiar with Photoshop blending modes or using shaders in 3D software this will make some sense to you. Otherwise, here are some quick things you can try.

You can edit the txf files with a simple text editor like notepad. Don't try using something fancy like MS Word or it will add extra crap into the file.

What You SeeWhat You Get
“RGB_888” “Opaque”Straight texture. No blending.
“RGBA_8888” “AlphaBlendThis image requires an Alpha channel that will be used for transparency. Good if you want to make some fancy stained glass windows
“RGB_888” “Add”pixels in the image will be added to anything they are in front of. This will typically make things brighter.
“RGB_888” “Multiply”pixels in the image will multiply with anything they are in front of. Dark pixels will make things darker. White pixels will have no effect
“RGB_888” “Subtract”pixels in the image will subtract from anything they are in front of. This will typically make things darker

Stuff to watch out for

  • Don't change the base name of any file (i.e. the filename without the extension). The names are important for the game to find the images you want to replace.
  • You may change the size of the images to increase details, but the aspect of the image needs to remain the same. Furthermore, all images need to have width and height to be power of 2 (i.e. 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, …) The maximum size is limited by the graphics card (and the graphics card memory) and must not exceed 2048. We recommend to leave the image size as it is (or by max double width and height to be on the safe side).
  • Supported file formats are: JP2 and PNG. You may change the fileformat from jp2 to png or vice-versa. It's just a matter of compression and filesize (which should be held small). So if you are kind, try both formats and use the one with smaller filesize.

Sharing your new texture set?

  • When you are done editing the images, create a .zip file containing the altered ones plus the corresponding .txf files. We recommend to add a preview of your Mod that gets shown on Gamerotica, by including an image named preview.jpg within the zip. The name of the .zip is not important, name it as you want.
  • Upload your .zip to the community here. The zip's size must not exceed 20 MB.

Important Notices

  • The uploaded zip file gets checked for its content. Do not include any additional files and/or folders except the modded images and .txf's to avoid that your upload gets rejected.
  • Your mod will get checked by Gamerotica staff. As long as there is nothing offensive or illegal the mod should get approved to share with the community.
  • Do not use copyrighted material for modding to prevent legal troubles for yourself and/or Gamerotica.