DDS problem

[eyore]

I seem to be having a senior moment, as I can't get my head round this issue.

When I use tiled textures I often create a separate snow object, as a winterised tiled texture can look silly if it extends to the side/underside of an object. The snow object has an invisible texture for all other seasons and a snow-wi.dds texture, as below, for the winter season.



I decided I wanted to get away from the simple white winter texture to something a little more varied to reflect the fact that the depth of snow will vary, so I thought I would use a "cloud" type alpha channel to try and creat the variety I'm looking for.



but the results are just patches rather than the varied density of snow I'm seeking.



I'm creating the .dds file using the nvidia plug-in with settings at 8.8.8.8 ARGB 32bpp unsigned.

I'm probably missing something painfully obvious, but any help appreciated.

[VictoryWorks]

Which shader are you using? If it only supports 8 bit alpha, or even 1 bit, then that would explain the jaggy edges where the nice shades of grey have become 8 versions of grey, or even just black and white.

[eyore]

Which shader are you using? If it only supports 8 bit alpha, or even 1 bit, then that would explain the jaggy edges where the nice shades of grey have become 8 versions of grey, or even just black and white.

I'm using TrainBasicObjectDiffuse.fx shader with Trans.

[VictoryWorks]

Yeah that shader only supports single bit (black and white) alpha transparancy, so it's turning your nice cloud into 2 colours, which create on/off for the alpha.
Not sure whether the season objects are limited to certain shaders but you might want to try BlendATexDiff instead? I rarely use alpha transparency so I'm struggling to remember which ones support full alpha.

[Pauls]

With some shaders Trans also needs a sub-setting of TEST.

Cheers
Paul