Talon Company New Flag

[Akroutus]

Greetings everyone.

 

I was playing FO3 (again and again) with mods. I'm not a modder, this is my first attempt at this.

 

This time, I tried to make my own mini-mod. You see, the vanilla Talon Company flag is, well, lousy to put it bluntly.

So, I had opted to use a black swooping eagle silhouette.

I created the pic as .dds and tried to use nifskope to substitute the vanilla flag. I adjusted the textures in the block list etc and the new flag appeared on the nifskope, and I saved the new .nif file. However, there is a problem, and the exact error message is One or more texture dimensions are not a power of two.""

I tried using texturizer, and it didn't work. GIMP also failed me, and I can't seem to adjust the bloody pic's dimensions.

Help would greatly be appreciated, either with the creation of it as a mod, or totally referring the mod to a more experienced modder.

Thanks everyone and keep up the great work.

[blackrat99]

You can't change the dimensions in GIMP? Or you couldn't save it?

 

The Talon banner is 1024x512 DXT5. Try using the same dimensions.

[Akroutus]

I couldn't save it as .dds in GIMP (and I uninstalled it after it refused to take in the .dds plugin)

Any other software would be a helpful choice if you have any recommendations.

[Akroutus]

So I got the .dds with the correct dimensions and everything, and I tried to edit it in the .bsa but to no avail.

I also did everything according to the instructions in Nifskope but the new flag won't replace the old one.

I also tried to edit it from the GECK, and also no success, the stupid old Talon Company banner is the one that still appears.

Bear with me, this is my first trial ever at modding. Any assistance would be welcomed and appreciated.

[blackrat99]

Did you extract the original Talon banner from the bsa and is that the image you're working on?

 

Most image editors (Paint Shop Pro and Photoshop for example) need the dds plugin to open and save dds files (dds.8bi which goes in the plugins directory of whichever program you're using). I don't use GIMP but I've read that some Windows builds for GIMP's dds plugin are broken. There may be other builds that are working though. You'll need to root around on Google. The plugin for PSP and Photoshop does work.

 

Once that's installed you should be able to open the original image and change it (or just create a new one with the same dimensions), then save it. If you still get an error message when opening a dds file it may be that the path's too long. If so, just move the file.

 

The original banner has ragged edges and tears created by transparent areas, so it will be easier just to edit the existing file rather than creating a new one, unless you know how to do that yourself.

 

When you save the image you may need to create a new normal map. You may be able to use the existing one if the new design is roughly in the same place (worth a try anyway) or even not have one, since the banner is a flat object. But if you need one you can create one in your image editor using yet another plugin or even without (but you will need to check Google for a tutorial because I'm rubbish at it and always forget how).

 

Finally, once you have an image in the right dimensions and an optional normal map (it doesn't have to the same dimension but still has to observe the power of two rule, e.g 512x256) add them to the .nif. If you can see the image in nifskope but not in the GECK, double check the .nif. Expand every block and check there isn't another texture path you've missed. Some items have more than one (the shader block is a good one to check).