low8all

You're right of course. Glad you explained it further for those who might be looking for more in-depth information.

No sweat csgators. To be honest, image editing, from a modding standpoint, is probably the easiest form of modding. Scripting and modeling/animating have huge learning curves while texture modding is singularly image-centric. It will either look good or it wont look good. It will either show up or it won't show up. It's nowhere near as complex and multi-layered as scripting or 3d but can, in most cases, have as big an impact and fundamentally change the game-play experience. (when done well and to the extreme)

When you import the .dds file? No. You can set the import to no mipmaps. Mipmaps are made on export by the dds exporter (if you have the option selected - which you should, generally speaking). If a dds image has no mipmaps, it will just be rendering the default version.

Right, mipmaps are LOD image maps that are used based on the players distance from a given texture. The further away the player is, the lower the LOD (the smaller the detail is needed) On the topic of alphas. The posters have an explicit alpha channel. You'll see it when you view the channels, labeled as alpha. It'll be white where the texture will show and black where it wont. Since the posters have torn edges and holes. You can change that just by painting on the alpha layer with black and white - black for see-through, white for opaque - and you can feather it of course for a smoother transition between the two (but the quality of that transition will be based primarily on your export settings and secondarily, on the users settings - so high quality setting will notice a much smoother/better transition between what's in alpha and what is not). When you save, to get a smooth transition, save as DXT3 ARGB 8bpp | explicit alpha. This will retain the feather between alpha and opaque (if there is one) and use the alpha channel explicitly - as it exactly is. Saving as 1bit alpha will create the alpha based on the 1bit pixel point on the alpha channel. It will either be alpha or it wont be. Which will jag the edges of any transition between 100% alpha and 0% alpha. Keeping in mind, of course, that the explicit version will be slightly bigger in file size but for posters, it's negligible.

Don't sweet it, there's nothing to understand. Being able to play one game and not another is irrelevant and means nothing, contrary to what the 'i can play Crysis but not <insert game du-jour here>' crowd would have you believe. Even if they use the same engine. Have you checked your eventlog for any unruly errors that happen around the same time you crash? Even if you're dumped to the desktop without any game-errors, windows might be throwing one or two - worth a check. Also it might be time to start shutting down some errant applications running in the background. P4's are pretty old and with only 1gb of RAM it might help.

I realize you've tried a lot of game-fixes but have you tried any system fixes? Defraged - tested the HDD for errors or corrupted files? I see you have a 512mb card and only 1gb of RAM, add on about another 2-400mb for windows and that doesn't leave much room for the game to swap in and out of memory meaning your system could very well be bottle necking somwhere between the HDD - RAM - GFX. Also checking your temps might be a good idea - not just CPU but also GPU and NB - especially your NB - at this point, given all the game fixes you've tried it might be time to turn the light on the system for a moment.

aha! tyvm (:

Where did you dl the max 2010 nif plugin? I couldn't find a 2010 version.

Thanks for the tut (: It explained a lot. Unfortunately, I'm not getting any audio at all. First they saved as wavs, then they looked for mp3's but there were only wavs so I reconverted to mp3's now it finds the mp3 but I still get nothing. I tested the audio files in a radio station mod I dl'ed and they play fine in that, just not mine. ):