Adding a Little Color
Ok, now we have the model and we could make a model out of it, but it's lacking something. Color. Oh, it has textures and would look like a neat little ship if we just left it, but it wouldn't look like a ship from the game. In the game you can pick the Team color and Stripe color for your ships. The extracted model only has the default colors: grey and grey. Plain, simple, dull, blah, and just plain old boring! We want our ships to have a little character to them, a little excitement, we want color! Well, don't worry, we'll get some color.
The first thing you need to do is to go to the go to the directory we have our model in. So open up "My Computer" or what ever you use to browse the files on your computer and get there. Once you get there, you'll see a whole slew of files. The .peo was the original model, and the .lif files are it's textures. The .mex is what the game uses for information about the ship. And we just made the .cob with it's .bmp textures. So if we just made all those 'new' textures, why are there so many .lif textures in there with no .bmp with it? Well, Relic made all those extra files when they were designing the ships and decided to combine some of them into larger files so the game wouldn't have to load so many. What that means to us is that the extra .lif files are useless. So you can do what I do and delete them. You can leave them if you like, but you'll see why I delete the extras here in a minute.
Extra files
Much better
Changing Formats
Ok, now the fun part. Well, ok it's not so fun, but pretty simple. Open the Lif2Psd program that you got and you'll see it's a pretty simple program. A whole two buttons. Wow. Good thing we only want to do one thin with it. So, click on the Open button (the folder) and the browse to the folder where the textures are at. Now pick the first in the list and open it. The texture will now appear in the window below. So that's what the white part is for, but what about the other button? If you hold your mouse cursor over it, a tooltip will pop up and say "Convert." Press it. Hmmm, did it do anything? Well, of course it did. If you look in the folder with all the files, there will be a new file with the .psd for it's extension. If you have either Paint Shop Pro or Photoshop, you will see it also is an image file. More on that later. Now, just go through the list and convert all the textures in the folder. If you think you forgot one, just re-open it and convert it again. The program will overwrite an old file, but we don't really care since we are making all new ones anyway. Better safe than sorry.
Have a good mouse clicking drill? Great. Now more simple but tedious work. But first, a quick note. I use Paint Shop Pro. Why? Well, for one it's $89 and not $699. It's also just about as good for all the basic stuff, and it's a pretty powerful graphics editor. And finally, I've been using it for 5 years now, so I'm stuck. If you like Photoshop, use it. I don't really care. In fact, probably any graphics editor that supports layers and can edit Photoshop format files will work. There are probably some good open source ones on Sourceforge.net that you can get for free. But I stick to what I know. So these next few paragraphs will describe how to change the default colors in Paint Shop Pro. The procedures are basically the same in Photoshop, but the details will be a little different. If you know how to use Photoshop, then you can figure out how to do it. So, that being said, let's make some cool colors.
Changing Colors
Ok, open the texture up in Paint Shop Pro (PSP) and you will see that there are up to three layers in it. These layers are the texture (TEX), the team color (COL1), and the stripe (COL2). Some files won't have all three layers. The might have TEX and COL1, some TEX and COL2, and some just TEX. Some will have two, or even all three, but only TEX has anything on it. This isn't really a big deal. Some textures on the ship just don't have one of the COLs on it. If that's the case then you don't really need to do all the following steps. Just close the file and move on. Why do what Deep Explorer already did for us?
Ok, the first thing we want to do is hid all but the COL1 layer. In Paint Shop Pro, just click on the little eye icon and that layer will be hidden. Also, make sure you highlight the layer you are working with. If you don't, you'll be editing the wrong layer and will screw it all up. If you do that, just re-open the file and start over. Simple problem, simple solution. Now, you'll see where all the team color would be on the texture. We want to change that, since grey is so boring. Go pick a color on your pallet. If you save it to a swatch, it will be easier to get it back when you are changing from color to color. Now, pick the fill tool (the paint bucket) and change all the grey on this layer to a new color.
Make sure you get all the little pixels on their own. I zoom into about 400% to make it easier to see. If you miss one or two, it's no big deal, but we want our ship to look cool so we'll get them all. Do this again for COL2. Keep in mind if you click on a grey area and it doesn't change color, you forgot to switch the layer you are working with. (No, I've never done that.) When you are done, unhide all the layers and you'll have some nice new colors.
Cool, colors!
Finishing Touches
Now, we need to do one last thing before we save our colored texture. We need to add one more layer and color it black. Move it to the bottom and you'll be set. Why are we doing this? Well, some of the files have transparent spots in them. When we save it as a .bmp, those spots will turn white. In the game, those spots are black. So this extra layer will make the textures look right. You don't actually need to do this for all the textures, but it doesn't hurt. If you can't see any transparent spots when all the layers are visible, then you'll be set. Also, there's another problem you may encounter. If, when you unhide all the layers, there are large black stripes where the stripe should be showing, the texture layer needs to be tweaked. To do this, hide all but the COL2 layer and use the magic wand tool to select all the COL2 parts. Hold shift to select multiple areas. Then unhide all the layers and switch to the TEX layer and press the Delete Key. Bing! There are your stripes. We may be deleting some of the texture on the stripes, but we want our stripes to be the color we choose! Not that stupid black. Yuck.
Ok, "Save As..." and select "Windows or OS/2 Bitmap (*.bmp)" and click "Ok." You'll get a warning that you will be overwriting another file, click ok. Then you'll get another one saying that it needs to merge all the layers for the bitmap format. Click ok again. There, now our boring grey-on-grey textures have been changed to the colors we want. So, when does this get hard anyway?