Adding six new 'quasi-factions' :)

[eadingas]

This is another useless graphical fix that does nothing to gameplay, but makes things look nicer on the map, brought to you by EB team :)
You know how there are six culture-dependant rebel flags for cities? We can change those easily to six different flags, thus creating six quasi-factions (they only have base culture in common, nothing else). The flags are in symbol6.tga and symbol7.tga in banners folder (I don't know what symbol8 does, it looks the same as symbol 7?) - they look black and empty at first, but if you view alpha channels, you'll see the rebel banners there. By toying with alpha channels, you should be able to modify the flag and its colors any way you like.
Though you may want to leave, say, an alpha border around the flag, otherwise you won't be able to tell how many armies are there in a city.

After that, you can also toy with the battlefield banners for captains, they are faction-specific for rebels, so you can have 21 extra captain flags in battles, for more diversity.

There are numerous problems with this solution of course, I'll let you work them out by yourself ;) but it looks nice.

[Monkwarrior]

Hi eadingas,
perhaps this is not the right place to ask, but nobody answered my other post.
How do you save the modified symbolsN.tga.dds files?
I have changed some symbols, but after saving the banners appear with a grey square around the faction symbol. :embarassed:
Sorry if this is a dumm question but, how do you "play" with alpha channels?
I see the three last files completely black. ~:confused:
I use Photoshop 7.0, if this is important.
Thanks in advance. :bow:

[eadingas]

This is a question for somebody from our graphic team to answer, I'm just the bringer of good news, sorry... hopefully somebody will soon appear with an answer.

[chemchok]

DJ wrote an excellent tutorial on editing unit textures that explains, step by step, how to open and save a .dds file.

https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?t=37203

In a nutshell, the first thing you have to do is download the DDS Photoshop Plug-in. This will allow you to preserve the file in the same format that the game uses.

To edit an alpha channel you have to see it first. In photoshop, go to View --> Channels. You'll now have a window with separate RGB, Red, Green, Blue, and Alpha channels. Make the Alpha Channel visible and select it to edit it. Whatever is black (or red, depending on what channels you are viewing) in the alpha channel will become transparent on the stratmap flag.

[Monkwarrior]

DJ wrote an excellent tutorial on editing unit textures that explains, step by step, how to open and save a .dds file....

To edit an alpha channel you have to see it first. In photoshop, go to View --> Channels. You'll now have a window with separate RGB, Red, Green, Blue, and Alpha channels. Make the Alpha Channel visible and select it to edit it. Whatever is black (or red, depending on what channels you are viewing) in the alpha channel will become transparent on the stratmap flag.

Yeah, I followed that tutorial, but I am much more noob than expected. :embarassed:

The detail that I didn't know was the way of seeing alpha channel. This is because it is not visible when the file is opened without MIP maps. After your indication I have seen the problem of my new banners and I understand why they looked so awful. I hope I will be able to solve the problems.
Thanks a lot. :bow:

[Teleklos Archelaou]

New to editing these. But where are those 21 slave banners? I found the regular greek, macedonian, etc. ones, but can't find the slave banners. From some of the text files it looks like they abandoned the path they were going to have for the slaves, but I can't find them now. I know they don't use the campaign map symbols, as I've already changed them. Frustrating.