Creating Images

[legowarrior]

I'm working on making the descriptions and images of the new Jomon, but I want to modify some of the regular images the game uses. Is there anyway to access the files from the base game so that I can modify them to my needs?

[Gandalf Parker]

Not by anything in the game.

But you can use the screen capture on your computer, and the paint program that came with it, to grab the images

[legowarrior]

I found the sprite dump. I can use that, but I never knew about the screen capture. Thanks for the tip.

[elmokki]

DO NOT USE SCREENCAPTURE.

Seriously, that's the worst possible way of getting unit graphics. Dominions 3 antialiases and possibly resizes (depends on resolution) sprites it draws so you'll get messed up results. Sure, they can be tidied up, but since the sprite dump contains every single sprite anyway, there's absolutely no point in taking screen shots to get graphics to edit.

But yes, sprite dumps are the way to go.

[llamabeast]

elmokki is very correct.

[Gandalf Parker]

I forgot we had Sprite Dumps now.
PrtScn used to be the only method. There was a whole library of them online that had been macro'd

But yes, definitely use the sprite dump now. And look forward to the sprite dumps from Illwinters new game Conquest of Elysium which releases soon. Some upgrades of units that are in Dom3.

[legowarrior]

Hey, I'm using Sprite Dumps, and I try to keep a black background, but now I find some of the units I created are surrounded by a black box on the recruitment screen, but not all the units. I can fix it by make the background Translucent, but then they look a little faded.

The weird thing is that the images look okay in the Domeditor.
Anyway help would be great. Thanks guys.

[elmokki]

That's probably because you are saving the images in a format with allows transparency. If you use the black background you need to save it in a format that doesn't. On GIMP you can just click on the layer and remove alpha channel, but on other programs I have no clue.

[legowarrior]

I'll see what I can do.
I'll try locking the images in GIMP, is that what you mean?

[legowarrior]

Okay, I'm able to create images using GIMP as TGA files, but for some reason, some of my images have black boxes around it with purple shadows. Any ideas why this is or how to stop it?

[llamabeast]

Yes. You need to find the "Remove alpha channel" option before you save the image. It's somewhere in the Layers menu if I recall correctly. This is in GIMP.

[legowarrior]

That seemed to work.