What's all needed to make a zone?

[JrFaust]

I made a zone named it paw and exported it to paw.s3d and did the export for paw_chr.s3d and it made a few others I believe for sounds. I placed it in my client directory. Loaded up EQ and #zoned to paw and there I was in the zone I made.

But I noticed one really strange thing all the textures weren't at all right. They were spotted with white, pink, purple, and black spots. I did use textures from EQ that I exported out of the neriak.s3d file.

I did notice that some of the bmp files showed in s3dspy but after they exported they wouldn't generate a preview, and PhotoShop couldn't open those. So I only used the ones that would open out side of s3dspy.

Any help or ideas would be appreciated.
Thank you for your time.

[Windcatcher]

1. When OpenZone exports your textures, it converts them to .DDS format (even though they have the .BMP extension). The reason is that .DDS textures preserve alpha (transparency) information, and they have good compression. Actually, it's common for the .BMP textures that come with EQ to actually be .DDS textures in disguise. S3DSpy uses a library called DevIL (Developer's Image Library) that can handle either format (and many others).

2. The client maintains a texture cache and what you're seeing is likely the textures from the last time you zoned to paw (the SOE one). If you turn off texture caching in the client before entering the world, your textures should show up fine. Off the top of my head I believe you turn off caching from the options button before logging in.

[JrFaust]

Well I turned off texture caching in the client and the textures still were messed up. I then tried some sample textures that I believe you provided and those worked fine. I'll try to do some more with it this weekend.


Thanks for your help and all the info.

[JrFaust]

Oh I saw that OZ can make a .map file, is that the same .map file that is needed for agro and line of sight?

Thanks