You don't need to be limited to 256 colours, only BoB1
was so limited, but the old textures made their way into
BoB2, just converted from .x8 (Rowan proprietary) to .dds.
The later .dds files when the terrain was reworked, are
full 24bpp, which is .dds standard.

I think you'll find that current photoshop handles .dds
just fine. Anyway, as long as you have one widget which
can read and write in .dds, that's all you need - do your
work in whatever editor you prefer, sending it the files
in a format it can understand, then pass them back to the
.dds capable viewer and save as .dds from there. There are
several types of .dds, some with separate alpha layers, but
the terrain textures are simple DXT1 files, one layer. Your
file save routine will ask you about this, I expect. When
.dds was new and uncommon, I used a program called DXTBmp,
by MWGraphics, which I think is still out there. Now, gimp
recognizes .dds, though I may have had to fetch the plugin.

If you are keen on getting in and actually painting up the
textures, a few things you should know. First, you should
note that they are all tileable, that is, if you stack up
instances of one tile to fill a block, the edges all match
each other, making a seamless surface. Yipes, (I'm re-editing
my reply in response to your edit...) if you are
interested in digging in to terrain work, you should know
the scope of the possible work is immense, so we just hack
away at little bits. Making textures is but a tiny part of the
process, although it is an epic amount of work in itself.

If you want to get an idea of what it all entails, start here
http://www.a2asimulations.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=8731
and then browse this zipped html file:
http://www3.telus.net/v1ncent/bob/BoB-Terrain-tutorialV2.zip
which provides some numbers on what is involved. For a quick
idea, a standard terrain texture represents 1.44km square,
and the BoB2 map is 738km on a side. Of course about 45% of
it is water, but still, it is quite a lot of territory. Here's
a map of the original Rowan work, you can see which parts were
detailed and which were lawn. we've filled in a bit of Pas de
Calais (a block with diagonal Abbeville to Dunkerque).

Currently we are limited to the number of tiles I discussed above, and
pretty much all of the are dedicated to the anglo side of the channel
as you can see from the map above, Rowan did no texturing in France.
We are presently working on hijacking a single tile, img0031, which was
some sort of odd orphan in the Rowan scheme, to use as a generic french
field tile - the french fields are so different from english, that our
standard set don't work very well in France. (We'd like to have a whole
french set of tiles, but that would require reworking the whole terrain
engine system, which in turn requires more coding skill than we have
presently available.) With that one tile, we could possibly slide it in
here and there to make France look more believable. Beyond that, work on
France requires a lot of research and preparation, followed by detailed
editing of the land-use maps which the Rowan terrain engine uses to
generate the terrain. This is all expplained in the links given in the
last post. These days I rely heavily on TARA - The Aerial Reconnaissance
Archive - for detailed information on what the terrain looked like in
1940, as you can see in the linked items.

If I were to choose where i thought more work were currently needed most
usefully in France, I would say any of
> improving the accuracy of the detailing along the coastal region south
from just south of Boulogne down to Treport, and inland at least 4km
> adding new detail west from Treport, along the shoreline for any fraction
of the way to Le Havre, and inland at least 4km.
> detailing Le Havre, its harbour, and up the Seine at least 10km.

You Got It. Since there isn't a deadline, that'll give me some time to get a handle on what you pointed out above.
I grabbed a little viewer called XNView....
Also found the NVidia plugin for PS...and yes, it asked me 5 different options just at the start of opening the DDS file.
Then I just grabbed a burner sponge to darken my initials on img0004 for a test. Then it asked me 1500 options about saving...
So I scratched that idea until:
A- hopefully you would reply-
B- google my butt off trying to learn a graphics system employed into BoB-
But I did follow your suggestion about using the older tiles.
As I mentioned, Bob looks so much more tranquil and pleasant as you fly around the fields, spotting the hayfields, the sheep & cattle, Mom's old farmhouse next to the tree line (next to the airfield,of course)
Dawn or Dusk patrol w/1940s music playing in the backdrop when all of a sudden the sky fills w/flak.

One thing for sure, if you ever get lost, just look for the flak.
And I need an address pm'd to me so I can send a payment to the staff (BDG)...If I'm gonna suggest this, and ask how about that, and get answers...then its only fair that I send some kind of donation.
I guess BDG is over in England, so if their gas is still running over 8 US dollars, someone in the group might be thankful for a few gallons.
Better catch me while I'm in a generous mode. When the morphine wears off and I'm crippled up again, I'm really not a nice person to be around. Being an animal lover, I run an animal rescue that can turn small choirs into huge tasks (since the surgeries)...that will pass hopefully by Christmas.

I'll tell ya one thing-
I never thought I'd see the day come when my flight sim collection was narrowed down to one.
Currently I have Falcon:Allied, IL-1946, Wings of Prey, and, of course, Bob.
I proposed to Bob early in the week and she said she would think about it.
Then she caught me fooling around w/WoP....
So WoP is off the drive....that saved 25Gbs...and a ton of visual confusion.
IL w/o a campaign is taking up 6Gb...(yawn) and those AI pilots yakin' their heads off all the time.
Falcon is somewhere on the drive, I can't remember where it is...!!!
My God, and I'm a Falcon nut....been married to Falcon since 1991.



PS- and all the while, I would see someone labeled 'MudMover' and just assumed that their strong point was ground attack-

OK. A few things. First of all, as a fully volunteer
organization of the open source spirit, if not exactly
the technical details (the commercial sources of the
software weren't quite able to bring themselves to
that level of magnanimity, so the source access agreement
has a few hooks in it that Stallman et al would have
problems with, though it doesn't impact us at all,
cuz we're still left free to hack to our hearts' content)
we don't even have a mechanism to accept money, which
only makes sense as we don't have a place in space
where we exist, either. "We" operate out of two or
three continents and a tropical island, depending
on our membership at any given time; a few of the
europeans have gotten together once or twice, but
the rest of us remain in our scattered refugia.

Another item, I've just discovered that you sent me a
couple of PMs, which generated email notifications
which for some reason were shunted off to the spam
folder, which hasn't happened before, so I will have
to solve that, tomorrow. I also see that the flag for
the PMs here at SimHQ is nowhere near as obvious as
it used to be, so I didn't even register it - a little
winking flag on the top bar, which I usually scroll out
of view immediately to get past the Day-by-Day image
to the post index. Anyway, I wasn't ignoring you.

PV, I'm trying to locate a certain file and I'm just not having any luck.
I'm getting back to the sighting topic of earlier.
Could you point me to the file that displays the sighting aperture for the B109-
I can be a symmetry nut sometimes, and as such, I disable behind the site at all times.
If I choose to fly the 109, I'll just wing shoot using best guess from what I see before me.
So I'd like to just remove the sight from view altogether.
Next patch, ask if they can implement a keystroke to remove sight reticle like I discovered in WoP...
Being a rifle and shotgunner, I can tell ya that there have been times where the sight actually became a hindrance and gut instinct proved the better.

Thanks Again, Hoss-
Blue Skies, we'll chat later.
Ed

Hot Damn- Thanks for the tutorial zip.
This will be a cool read I can put on the nightstand, my man.
If you knew how frustrated I could get just googling around (and wasting hours bytheway)
Time wasting that I can't afford to be wasting these days...
You hit a wall after while and just poke and prod through trial & error and that soon gets exhausting for me anymore.
I don't have that college try like I used to.

Cockpm16\sight2.dds looks like a pretty likely suspect

Yes, I caught that.....was going to just swap it out w/a blank....but it was a no-go.
The blank swap worked fine for the spitfire...

I relocated the following to a backup folder-
sightgls & 4 of the sishadw files...as well as sight2 which I checked before posting.
Edited the BDG file to dump cache...
Funny thing is XnView displayed the correct thumbnail of sight2..but the blowup view just shows a circle w/crosshairs.
But anyway, moving the files didn't help, went to IA, takeoff using the 109 and there was the sight.
What's your guess-
Ed

Ahh, the sight files are in DXT5, which is multi-layer. It will have a
graphic layer, and then an alpha layer. The alpha layer determines what
is transparent, and how much. If I open it in gimp, it shows a yellow
crosshair on a checkerboard background, which is gimp's indicator that
the crosshair is a visible object over a transparent background. The
gimp layers dialogue only shows one layer, but it is labelled "main
surface". If I open it in DXTBmp, it shows a main image of a bright
yellow ball, like an incandescent lightbulb. On the side panel, it
shows the alpha layer, white on black, of the crosshair. This tells me
that the crosshair shape will be displayed in the colour mapped by the
main image layer.

Oh, yes, another thing. The original image files for BoB and BoB2 are
in Rowan's proprietary ".x8" format. Subsequent patch versions are
set to seek files based on filename, and use any with extension .dds
first, failing which .pcx, failing which .x8. This allows us and user
modders to add new versions of files in preferred formats, for any image
used by the program, at any time. So removing a file will cause the
program to go to the previous version. If it can't find any version,
it will generally be unhappy. Best to give it a sheet of full alpha,
rather than trying to remove a file.

(I don't work much with image files, so I don't remember these things.)

Yes, Yes...that is how Adobe tells the user the very same thing. The checked background means there are layers that haven't been flattened or combined, etc. Yeh, I got ya.
And yes, moving file that its calling during launch (execute sim) just freezes the screen (loading bimap display)
I would see in the BDG file something about using dummy and I've witnessed a small red square in place of some imgage that I would move around. I really like the concepts you explained above.
Oh, and don't worry about remembering things. Your post show you to have a sharp memory as it is.
Hopefully as time goes by, you'll still have that talent of recall.
I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer these days.
And I'm told it'll get worse.
Ain't we got fun?
Good Mornin'