Odd behaviour. Both the game and the toolset are treating TGA the same as DDS but not all textures are affected. Symptoms - the affected TGA images are flipped both horizontally and vertically. At first I thought it only seemed to affect non-square textures but I have at least one example that is square that suffered this fate. But I repeat this is not affecting all TGA images. While converting the affected TGA images to DDS does cure it, this is not an ideal solution as I have had textures screwed up by the DDS algorithm before now.
Forgot to mention, as far as I can tell, this only seems to be affecting textures for models which are planes - i.e. flat.
TR
Only time I ever ran into anything at all similar was when extracting a dds. texture from a Hak via NWN Explorer in order to edit it and then put the new version back into the Hak as a tga. replacing the original…
Invariably, the grotty little nurkum would render in Toolset and Game upside-down. (Don’t recall if they also mirrored horizontally). It would do this more or less every time.
BUT - it only occurred if I saved my edited version by simply saving changes to the texture. If I used ‘Save As’ and saved it as a new version (with the same name) overwriting the older one, rather than just updating the old one, the problem never occurred and was thus hit with an enormous brick.
No idea if this is relevant to your weirdness, but, as I say, it’s the only time I ever had textures turn upside-down. Are the affected textures ones you - or anyone else - has edited from an earlier version in any way? If so you could try exporting all those affected and saving them as new versions of themselves, see if anything happens.
Thanks. Following your suggestion I put them through TGAFlipper twice and that fixed the problem. Until your reply it had been so long since I had a problem like this that I clean forgot about that solution. I also identified a previously trusted program as the culprit that caused the problem in the first place. Whatever crap it added TGAFlipper stripped it out.
Thanks.
TR
I haven’t had this problem at all since using NWN Crunch to make tga. I do the work in png or other convenient format first.
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might i ask, what was this trusted program ?
XNShell - A thing that sits in the right-click menu. In other words when you right-click on an image you can use it to do a number of things from a sub-menu including converting from one format to another. Since it is no longer working correctly I am not providing a link since who wants a broken tool.
TR
There seem to be a few issues with TGA going upside-down like a dead bug, not just with NWN, but as a format in general… But so far as I know, the ‘Save As a new version’ trick eliminates the issue.
Still, I’d love to know exactly what it is about TGA that causes the problem in the first place…
Rodents, I expect.
PHoD
Thanks for the loan of the bricks, BTW.
TR
In my experience, this happens when you export a Bioware DDS as a TGA from NWN Explorer. This is because, iirc, the Bioware DDS format is read as upside down by the engine, so when you convert the TGA to DDS the TGA gets flipped.
This is why I still use Paint Shop Pro 7. Although 20+ years old, it has this simple batch edit interface that allows you to flip all the TGA files you exported without having to open/save as each one manually.
I never really understood why Bioware’s DDS format appears to be fractionally, subtly - yet spleen-rupturingly - different to every other DDS format in the universe.
And there I was mentally blaming Texas…
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As I understand it, Bioware dds aren’t actual dds. I don’t know if they’re a prototype or what, but they’re not the final version
See the wiki for (probably) more information on DDS (that is Direct Draw Surface format) than you’ll ever need.
https://nwn.wiki/display/NWN1/DDS
TR
