Texture Editor

Understanding DAoC Textures

 

Controls such as buttons, checkboxes, statusbars, and resize images make use of textures to display an image. Usually a texture contains many different sections that are later used for a variety of controls. Take a look at the following texture for a better idea.

 

image\img00050.gif

 

As you can see, this single texture file contains sections that are used for health, endurance and power status bars, full resize images, scrollbars, and many other controls.

 

In order to select a portion of the texture to apply to a control, the Texture Editor is used. The texture editor provides a graphical interface allowing users to select the position and size of a texture section.

 

Selecting Texture Coordinates

 

The Texture Editor provides a simple graphical interface for selecting texture coordinates.

 

image\img00051.gif

 

Most textures come in sets. For example, the set of textures for a Button templates includes a texture for the "Normal" state, "Pressed" state, "Normal Highlighted" state, "Pressed Highlighted" state, and "Disabled" state. Each of these textures requires it own set of coordinates and all textures in a set must be taken from a single texture page.

 

Texture

 

The Page field determines which texture to select from. Please note that all textures in a set must be selected from the same page.

 

The Zoom field allows you to change the scale of an image to make coordinate selection easier. The zoom does not affect the size of the final selection.

 

Size

 

The size fields vary based on the type of control being modified. For example, Button templates have only a single width and height while Full Resize Image templates have a left, center, and right width and a left, middle, and bottom height.

 

Since multiple texture sections in texture set share dimensions, changing the size of one selection will also change the size of the other selections. For example, if the "Normal" selection of a Button template is set to 100x25, the "Pressed", "Normal Highlighted", "Pressed Highlighted" and "Disabled" images will also be set to 100x25.

 

Coordinate Editor

 

The coordinate editor displays the selected texture along with each texture section (show as a highlighted outline.) The drop-down list at the top of preview can be used to select a texture section, or you may select the texture section directly from the preview area.

 

image\img00052.gif

 

Once you have selected a texture section outline, you can drag the outline to adjust position or resize the outline by moving the mouse to the edge of the outline and dragging. To fine-tune the selected position, use the arrow keys while holding down the "SHIFT" key. Likewise, selection size can be adjusted by holding down the "ALT" key while pressing the arrow keys.

 

 

 

image\img00053.gif Please Note
Be sure to select coordinates for all texture sections in a texture set. Failure to do so will cause controls using the specified template to be rendered incorrectly when running the Dark Age of Camelot client.