Ray?

Your post is important to us. However Ray is busy working at this time and is unable to come to the forum.

I would be glad to try to answer your question if desired.

I suggest you ponder these thought provoking questions amongst yourselves. I'm sure there is more than one member with the techincal experience to provide the needed answers.

http://home.comcast.net/~tom_forsyth/blog.wiki.html#%5B%5BPremultiplied%20alpha%5D%5D

http://graphics.pixar.com/Compositing/paper.pdf

And if so many people are having problems with this, I can go back to using standard alpha.

One benefit of using premultiplied alpha is that edges don't bleed when bilinear filtering.

premultiplied:
destcolor = srccolor + (1-srcalpha)*destcolor

non-premultiplied:
destcolor = (srcalpha)*srccolor + (1-srcalpha)*destcolor

additive:
destcolor = (srcalpha)*srccolor + destcolor

Another neat side effect of premultiplied alpha is that you can do both alpha and additive in the same texture by having an alpha of zero and a color of > 0, such that if you were to unmultiply the alpha from the color you would get a color greater than white.

Okay, i don't mean to be a nitpicker, this is just an innocent question.

I really prefer the powerbar/distance indicator layout of the old hud. With the new setup plus the direction damage indicators, the crosshairs feel very crowded. There's a lot going on right in the center of the screen making it more difficult to aim IMHO. That and with everything smushed in, it's more difficult to read the movement of your target's ship because of all the hud features it can hide behind. The transparency of the old hud helped with this. IMHO, the transparency was a good thing, I'm with snax on that.

I'm not suggesting you move everything back to the way it was, but would it be possible to make an option where you could keep the newer hud (the borders and such), but replace the powerbars and damage indicators with the old ones while removing the directional damage indicators completely? In simpler terms, an option to clear out the area near the crosshairs and put only the old powerbars in that area. Or maybe if I could just figure out how to regain the transparency of the old hud.

I'm also with Snax on the simplicity issue.

you can get back the old additive way by setting alpha to zero but keep color of some of the textures.

Maybe I'll make a new HUD skin that duplicates the old HUD as an example of how to do it.

Ghost, I think that may get resolved if and when the Devs open up the Lua to us skinners. I've got some plans to basically remove everything that isn't entirely essential to a pvp'er.

If and when the time comes!

And Ray, I've basically got it figured out. My only remaining problem is that Photoshop and Fireworks all assign any areas with 0% opacity an RGB value of white (instead of black which the engine requires). Illustrator does this ok, but does a terrible job of antialiasing the edges (it ends up with white pixels around the edges of the hud components).

I'll take a read through your links. Maybe my answers will be questioned there!

Edit: Just had a brain-thingy. I got Illustrator to make the most boootifull curved, graduated transparent objects. If anyone is using Illustrator and wants to know how I'll post a quick tutorial. Its pretty simple.

Thx ray. I wouldn't want to waste a dev's time by asking for help in how to go about putting the alpha to zero and essentially getting that old transparent effect. However, is there a player who might be able to instruct me on how to go about doing so with Gimp? I'm reasonably computer savy but am somewhat of a noob when it comes to image design.

I just want the new file names. :(

just sort the files in skin.zip by date. these are the ones that have been modified since the beginning of august:

powerbar_right.png
powerbar_left.png
powerbar_right_bg.png
powerbar_left_bg.png
hud_damage_bottom.png
hud_damage_top.png
hud_chat_scroller_bg.png
hud_chat_scroller.png
hud_cargo_more.png
hud_damage_left.png
hud_damage_right.png
hud_triangle.png
hud_updateicon.png
hud_distance_progress.png
hud_new_crosshairs.png
hud_new_aimdir.png
Copy of hud_damage_top.png
hud_distance_bg.png
Copy of hud_damage_bottom.png
Copy of hud_damage_right.png
Copy of hud_damage_left.png
hud_distance_activate.png
hud_new_powerbars.png
hud_new_distance.png
hud_target_over.png
hud_target.png
hud_target_original.png
hud_radar_left.png
hud_radar.png
hud_radar_right.png
hud_border.png
hud_chat_border.png

of few of them aren't used though.

Ghost, I'll layout what I did in Illustrator, maybe it will have some obvious crossover points:

1. create a new document that is the size of the HUD element you are replacing (ie 32px x 128px for the power bars).

2. create two layers (or more), one with a black background, one with the new hud element.

3. copy all the elements (black background, new element) to the clipboard.

4. rasterize everything to 72dpi/transparent background.

5. create a new transparency mask for the rasterized HUD element/black background (one bitmap now)

6. paste the original black background/hud element into the transparency mask. Any coloured parts need to be changed to greyscale. If you had a graduated transparency you need to take this into account now, with fully opaque being assigned a 100% black, and fully transparent being assigned 100% white (50% opaque gets 50% grey, etc.)

7. Make the black background in the transparency mask 0% opaque, NOT WHITE.

8. Back out of the mask, export:png.

Now, this definately looks similair to every other programs method of doing this. Why it only works for me in Illustrator? Because this is the only method I've found so far that will assign RGB values of Black to fully transparent (0% opaque) areas. All the other programs I have assign RGB values of White to fully trans areas.

Also, I too would love to have an anotated list of what does what. There does seem to be a lot of stuff that doesn't do anything or is part of the old skin.

Copy of hud_damage_*.png for existance.

I gave it a shot, either I just don't know my way around the program well enough (which is entirely possible) or I can't do it that way in gimp.

Ok, it seems that most paint programs don't deal with alpha the way I want them to.

Before you all get too involved in your own authoring pipelines, I'm going to figure something out.
What I think I'll do is to make a utility program that you would run your image through and it will convert it. I think that will be easier than making a plugin for all of the different popular paint programs.

I did find out that photoshop cs2 will export TIFF with pre-multiplied alpha, but then you will have to find a way to convert it to a png.

Will that inhibit me doing it the way I am right now? Because for me it works really well and lets me use just one program.

Whatever you're doing will not break.

I think I got it:

just export it from photoshop,using tiff format (ray said me that) be sure to have an alpha channel in your image and everything in a single layer but unflatenned, of course

check 8 bits and RGB in the mode in photoshop

than, import it on Fireworks and save as using fireworks PNG as the format

good luck!

As long as your utility program runs on vaguely POSIX-compatible OSs (ie: OS X, Linux, whatever), then sounds good. :-)

Also, I've heard rumors of a gimp-pythonfu plugin to do premultiplied alpha. Dunno anything much about it...

Go Ray!

ok. I rewrote my premultiply script Script-Fu now. This version should run out of the box on all platforms gimp runs on.
The sucker works exactly the same way as the python version (including the slowness :P)

http://home.arcor.de/famscheffler/ven/venpremul.scm

After dropping it into the scripts directory and a restart of gimp it will show up under Menu->Script-Fu->premul-scm

EDIT: small update

not sure if it's intentional or an oversight but the mining bars aren'T skinnable. and they still have that green color from the old hud.

spuck: I applied your script to my HUD elements and they needed a second layer. I duplicated the layer and re-ran the script. The files still do not show up in the skin.