Tanisha CTF fix: her team color is currently nigh unrecognizable

[cheb]

So, as avid CTF player I am always annoyed by the Tanisha skin.

I mean, there is so much skin   that her clothing takes disproportionally small area on screen.
Seeing this chick in CTF gets you stumped: is she red? Or is she blue?
Right, she's brown.
And the clothing having very dark AND muted colors absolutely doesn't help  

I lost count how many times I kept shooting a teammate or, as a red player, was !suddenly! fragged  by a blue Tanisha because her brownness made me feel she was red.

So... There is my fix. http://chebmaster.com/downloads/pak7-tanisha-ctf-fix.pk3

Sorry for PNGs, the GIMP kept exporting TGAs that Open Arena kept considering lacking an alpha channel (although they definitely had it) so the head wings were reandered with thick black squares.

I also changed the *.skin files so that the base DM skin remains unchanged with its dark dull blue boots.

See what I did overcompensating the skimpiness by overtly bright colors. I tested it with two teams of Tanisha bots, works reasonably well. I had no trouble telling red from blue even at distance.

[cheb]

P.S. ARGH, I have no idea WHY  OA keeps ignoring alpha channel on PNGs and TGAs that clearly HAVE it! 

Anyways, if anyone can make these skins work, please help. They make  team colors distinctive:

[Gig]

I do remember having some problems with Alpha channel in tga saved by Photoshop. My workaround was to export the image to png, then open the png in gimp, and then export to tga from there. I never tried using the png in OA... (I was not even sure it was supported... and at that time, I was using the old q3radiant).

PS: maybe there is some problem with the blendfunc used in a shader? I don't know if that skin is using some shader... some blending functions do use black as transparency, instead of using the alpha channel. But I ever undersood very little about such stuff...

PPS: is your gimp updated? I don't think that's the issue, but who knows...

[cheb]

is your gimp updated?

2.8.18

maybe there is some problem with the blendfunc used in a shader?

There is none as far as I see.


I tried various options, with RLE without RLE, origin in lower left corner, origin in upper left corner - I got inverted distorted texture in the last case, BUT with the same glitch included: on red Tanisha the alpha channel works, on blue Tanisha it doesn't. 

I even changed all blue .skin head files to use the same gldskin_red.tga the red one does.
NOPE. 

[Neon_Knight]

IICR Tanisha will be one of the cut skins for OA3. Same issue as Tony.

[Gig]

Cheb, I see that in the pk3 package you posted above, you placed both .png and .tga files (with the same path/name)
Are you sure the game is picking the right version of your images? I see that you specified .png in the .skin file, but who knows!

[Gig]

A thing I am noticing is that in OA 0.8.8 pk3s there are
models\players\hnt\gldclothes.tga
and
models\players\hnt\gldclothes_red.tga
(they are in pak2-players-mature.pk3) but there is NO gldclothes_blue.tga

Looking at models\players\angelyss\lower_tanisha_blue.skin (from the same pak2 file), it looks like it uses the "default" gldclothes.tga clothes also for her blue skin.

So, to make your own gldclothes_blue.tga, from which file did you start from? I can guess from gldclothes.tga, which is quite blue-ish already, although quite dark...

[cheb]

Tanisha will be one of the cut skins for OA3.

It's fine but
a) It's still alooong way
b) I suspect some ppl will keep playing 0.8.8 anyway
So why not accumulate small fixes like this one into 0.8.9 ?

which is quite blue-ish already,

it is NOT.
I distinctly remember being silly-fragged because I perceived a blue Tanisha as red because, you know, brown. It was too dark in that place to discern the color of her boots (or it was overridden by the color of her booty anyway).
That's why I had to make a separate blue skin.

It's a rule of reverse proportionality: the less clothing there is the more saturated colors it must have to be a viable team skin.

I see that in the pk3 package you posted above, you placed both

[facepalm times twenty]
Corrected, re-uploaded.

[Neon_Knight]

Tanisha will be one of the cut skins for OA3.

It's fine but
a) It's still alooong way
b) I suspect some ppl will keep playing 0.8.8 anyway
So why not accumulate small fixes like this one into 0.8.9 ?

The decision to finish the 0.x branch with 0.8.8 is already set in stone. All the resources (with the few people we are) are now focused on doing OA3.
About the other point, my reply is the same as the 0.8.1 vs. 0.8.8 discussion: OA is about going forward. We're not going backwards.

[Gig]

Though, understanding the reason why that specific texture isn't shown correctly may still be interesting...