How to add Textures to The Dark Mod

Create your texture

This is mostly artwork. Be sure to start off with useful raw material with a reasonably high resolution. Where possible, work from photo-references. A basic guide can be found here: Texture Creation - Basic Tutorial.

A few things to remember: Make sure your texture dimensions are a power of 2 (eg, 128, 256, 512, 1024, etc). Other common mistakes can be found here: Common Texture Mistakes

Things to remember

• Use good source material
• Avoid lighting baked into the diffusemap
• Keep your PSD/Gimp working version safe!

Save your Texture in the correct Format

Save the diffusemap, the normalmap and an optional specularmap to a TGA file. The Texture Guidelines will help you choosing the correct resolution. A TGA version of your diffusemap is supposed to be uploaded to our hi-res repository for future reference (see below).

Once your TGA file is saved, you will have to create DDS files for the diffuse and specular (not the normalmap) as well. These are smaller in size and can be loaded faster by the engine. Follow the DDS creation guide to learn how to create the DDS files in the correct formats.

Also, create an editor image out of your diffusemap. The editor image dimension should be 256x256 pixels and the file should be saved in the JPG format. Add the _ed postfix to the filename name (like mytexture_ed.jpg).

When you upload textures, be sure to upload the files to the right spot. The .dds diffuse and specular go in the dds/textures/ folder structure. The .tga normalmap goes in the textures/ folder structure. The .tga of the diffuse and specular is needed as well in case we ever want to make modifications to the texture or new textures based on the old. Opening and resaving .dds files results in loss of detail, so all new versions of textures should be made from the .tga files. Save the diffuse and specular .tgas to the hires repository (they can optionally be RLE-compressed).

Things to remember:

• Most textures don't need speculars
• Create DDS for your diffusemap and specularmap.
• Keep TGA version of your diffusemap and specularmap.
• Create a TGA version of your normalmap (uncompressed, no RLE).
• Create a JPG editor image (max. 256px)

Name your Texture

You should give your texture a descriptive name, usually three words, like "rough_dark_flagstones01.tga". Try to think about what mappers might want to know when looking for your texture. If the name is really distinctive, then a number is probably not necessary, but for other names a number might be appropriate.

If your texture tiles only in one direction, include the phrase "tiling_1d" at the end of the name. If your texture does not tile (repeat) at all, add the phrase "nontiling".

Diffusemaps should have no extension to their name. Normalmaps should have a "_local" extension at the end of their name. Specular maps should have a "_s" extension, the editor images go with an "_ed" extension.

So to sum this up, you should have at least three files ready to upload (in this example the name is mytexture):

• The diffusemap in DDS format: mytexture.dds (note the lowercase)
• The normalmap in TGA format: mytexture_local.tga
• The editor image in JPG format (max. 256 pixels in size): mytexture_ed.jpg
• (Optional) The specularmap in DDS format: mytexture_s.dds

Move the Texture to the right Location

The Texture Folder Structure can help you finding the right folder for your texture. Be sure to rename all your DDS file extensions to a lowercase .dds (the Compressonator always creates files with uppercase extension, TDM requires them to be lowercase).

Name your Material Entry

Your material entry should be added to the .mtr file that has the same name as the folder your texture is saved in. For example, the material entry for a texture saved in "textures/darkmod/wood/panels" should be saved in the .mtr file, "tdm_wood_panels.mtr".

You should name your material entry the same name as your diffuse texture, including the folder path structure (eg, "textures/darkmod/wood/panels/rectangle_oak_face"). (Do not add .tga or .dds to the end.) The only time this differs is when multiple shaders are using the same diffusemap, or when your texture doesn't tile (or tiles in only one direction). In the latter case, you would add "/nontiling/" or "/tiling_1d/" to the end of the folder structure (a 'virtual' folder, essentially). (The textures used to be separated like that in the actual folder structure, but due to D3's inability to read .dds files five folders deep, they had to be moved.)

Upload the Textures

Once, you have checked your texture in-game (and are pleased with the results), you'll need to upload the files to our SVN repository:

• Upload the diffuse, normal, (specular,) and editor image to the regular darkmod SVN.
• Upload the uncompressed diffuse (in TGA format) to our darkmod_hires SVN repository (into the tga_backup subfolder).