Our ReVolt Pub

I don't have a good view on the problem, but it has been investigated by a few members and it has come to the conclusion that the newest 1.2 alpha does not seem support 32-bit bitmaps. Nonetheless, this is what the car in question looks like in 1.2 (thanks to Mladen for providing the picture):



As you'd probably expect, it does not look correct at all. I myself decided to see if I can fix it, so I opened the .bmp file in Paint.NET and decided to save it without doing any changes. To my surprise, the problem was actually fixed. Afterwards, ZR and Skarma have debated the issue, reaching the conclusion that the newest 1.2 alpha might not support the settings ZR initially saved the .bmp with, even though the latest beta does.

In case I sound confusing (though the pictures should provide enough explanation), I'm going to provide links to the car so you can see for yourselves: the original can be downloaded from here, while you could just grab the updated version on RVZT.

In fact it's rather the opposite. Beta doesn't really support 32 bit bitmaps (it just ignore the alpha layer, which mean the texture is always rendered as opaque) while Alpha (starting with 11.0525) does use the alpha layer.

Check this post (and here as well) for more info.

I presume the original texture was broken (the header tell that the alpha values are relevant while they are not) but since it can't be downloaded without an account at box.com I couldn't have a look at it.

The version available on RVZT uses a 24 bits texture so the useless alpha layer has just been removed, obviously fixing the transparency issue.

Thank you for the reply.

I do not recall being required an account to download from box.net but, nonetheless, here is a mirror; although I'm not sure if it can be of much use anymore.

32-bit textures seems to be fine for me - I have this texture pack installed and it works just as expected. Besides, the Re-Volt logo in Frontend itself is a 32-bit texture so if 32-bit support should stop working, it would likely be much more visible already.

I can't fathom why this has been changed?

UrbanR @ May 15 2013, 02:56 PM wrote:here is a mirror; although I'm not sure if it can be of much use anymore.

Just to be sure I checked it...
As you can see below the alpha layer of the original texture actually holds some data.



The white areas will be rendered opaque while the black areas will be seen as fully transparent. I opened it with XnView and GIMP and both display the transparency the same way that v1.2 does. On the other side MS Paint (gasp) as well as the default MS image previewer that comes with XP (re-gasp) display the image as opaque, but I wonder if these tools support 32 bit BMP actually...

zipperrulez @ May 15 2013, 07:25 PM wrote:I can't fathom why this has been changed?

To support alpha transparencies, that is to say not only pixels fully opaque or fully transparent (using the black colorkey), but also semi transparent pixels. The most evident benefit is the possibility to use anti-aliasing around non-rectangular shapes, but it can also serve other more elaborated purposes (eg. a semi transparent window with stickers on it without having to use extra polygons for the opaque stickers).