Creating Tiles [Mini Guide]

[Lex_Hedley]

Hi Guys

Finally managed to create a tile.
Seems silly now why I struggled before!

I was looking at previous threads and the DizzyAge Manuals and I exploded a few tiles just to get my head around it and have got it working.

I've created an RGB bitmap and coloured the background red. I've then deleted the image and re-coloured the background black,
I then used tgaworks tool to implode it together to create the .tga file which is working in the map

The problem is I have quite a few images to do this with and can see this taking a while.

Originally I was using Paint.NET and I have taken screenshots of the images I need as I'm not a brilliant artist and saved them as pngs.
I deleted the background so it was the crosshatch (meaning transparent?).
I am then saving it as a .tga as Paint.NET has this option but they weren't showing up in the DizzyAGE editor.

I then tried again thinking I might have missed something which lead me to this:

When I save it as a tga there are some Settings
Bit Depth
Auto Detect
? 32-Bit
24-Bit
Compress(RLE)

I selected 32-Bit and made sure Compress(RLE) WAS NOT selected and this worked.

--
Other Threads
http://www.yolkfolk.com/bb/showthread.php?t=1503

[Grandad]

I'm no expert Lex, but I think that white in the alpha file acts as a kind of 'mask' for the rbg file so when I've made the RBG file of the object, I give it a neutral background, save it then re-open it and colour the 'object' white and the background black and save it as the 'alpha' file, then reopen the rbg file and colour the background black - this is mainly cos I like to have 'black' lines round the objects - Then just use the rbg file in the first line of the TGA works programme and the 'alpha' file in the second line and it works fine. I do tend to save the pictures as bitmap files as you don't lose any of the colour, especially if it's fairy detailed.

[delta]

especially if it's fairy detailed.

detailed with fairies? now that'd be something to see!

[frogandhat]

Grandad's fairies are more dusty than detailed!
Sorry, but you will understand this once you've played Daisy's Search!

[delta]

yes, I get that sometimes with GIMP. It does seem to have a bit of a 'memory'. What I tend to do now is create a new tile to draw things in instead.

Regarding tiles you've already done, copy the whole thing into PAINT, fix it in there, and copy it back into a new blank tile. Copying it into paint removes the alpha (transparent) layer, wiping any 'memory' in the alpha layer.

[Lex_Hedley]

I made a quick page on How To create a Tile using Paint.NET just for reference,
Kept it in the same style as the articles page to be consistent.
Hope its useful for others

http://dizzyage.alexhedley.com/tiles.html

[Meph]

That should come in useful.