I was rummaging through the effect shaders, and noticed they had one for nearly every color but yellow. I copied the red effect shader and replaced its red gradient with a yellow one I cooked up in Gimp 2.0. It appears in the game well enough, but it's missing something. Side by side, the red effect shader pulses and fades, while the yellow shader is completely opaque and static. Since the yellow shader is nearly a copy of the red shader, I would think they would behave similarly, which leads me to believe it's something baked into the DDS file. This is where my knowledge ends.

Is anybody familiar with creating textures and/or DDS files for the CK? Is there a certain setting or certain layer I'm missing that allows the gradient to appear translucent? Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks!

you are probably missing an alpha channel. if the alpha on the original has gradient value, you will need to save the dds as DTX5 or DTX3 depending on the detail of the gradient.

if it is just a 1-bit "cutout" you can save it as a DTX1 - 1bit alpha

I created a gradient that runs from transparent to yellow, and compressed it as BC3 / DXT5. When I load the file into the CK, it reads it as only two colors without the gradient, black and yellow. In-game, it's just black and yellow. It seems somewhere in the process of exporting the file I'm losing the transparency.

The settings I'm given are Compression, Format, Save(layer), Mipmap, Color Selection, Dithering, Mipmap filter, and Gamma correction. There seem to be several compression types with DXT5 in the name, such as RXGB (DXT5), Alpha Exponent (DXT5), and YCoCg (DXT5). With a compression set, I can't select a format, and I'm unsure if changing the format would be necessary.

yes i realize that, what i am talking about is the alpha channel. the alpha channel dictates transparency level. whitest = opaque, black = totally transparent, any greyscale/gradient = semi-transparency

if you simply recolored the red effect shader to yellow, you can just copy over the alpha channel from the red one

I could, but I feel I'd be better served learning where I'm going wrong.

When I create a new image with the background set to transparent, there appears to be an alpha channel there, but that doesn't seem to help. Some people have suggested that Gimp and Paint.net aren't properly exporting to the DDS file format, which loses the alpha channel in the process, but I haven't had any better luck with the conversion programs they've suggested.