Importing Textures into MM6 and MM7 - Help!

[redwoodtreesprite]

I'm making a mod that replaces one of the MM7 PC females with a MM6 PC female. So far I have successfully imported the faces with a few adjusted "new" ones and them all renamed to correspond with the proper ones in MM7. And I'll be using the same sounds the original MM7 female uses.

But it looks like the paper doll textures need to have alpha channels, and I can only import bmps using the MM7View program. And when I tried to import the main body retexture as a bmp, I got an error message about it needing to be 8bit color format and must include pallette.

Can someone help me with this? Once I learn how to make the alpha-channel textures that will work with MM6 and MM7, there's no end to the cool mods I can release.

EDIT - I was able to save the bmps as 8bit, but there still are no alphas, and MM7View can't import tgas or dds files. So I have a solid blue background for the paper doll.

[GrayFace]

I'm almost sure there's no way to use alpha channel in MM7.

[redwoodtreesprite]

OK, here's what I've found out so far. The alpha channel textures in MM7 are alpha-channeled bmps. Which apparently are possible to make in Adobe Photoshop, but not in Paintshop Pro, which is what I have. So I can't do any modding that alters the alpha-channel bmps for at least a year.

But I have been able to import unaltered alpha-channeled bmps from MM6 and MM8. I've made a personal play replacer that changes quite a few weapons, shields, rings and such for MM7, using ones from MM6 and MM8. And have been having fun with Dragon PC characters.

For the dragon PCs, I replaced a male and a female goblin's face animation textures with the ones from MM8, and I used the tall scuba suit textures for the paper doll bodies. There is a tiny bit of pixel glitching occasionally with the face animation frames, but I've found it easy to ignore.

I have also done a replacer that changes many of the gross undead-looking human NPC faces with cooler ones from MM6 and MM8.

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Unfortunately, without an OK from Ubisoft's legal department, I can't release any of the replacer mods, as it would involve uploading an entire modified game file, and would also include assets from MM6 and MM8.

But it's quite easy to do. There's an editor for MM8 that lets you unpack the contents of a whole game file at a time. And then it's just a matter of organizing and renaming the replacer textures to match the originals. And then using MM6View or MM7View to replace them.

[GrayFace]

Where have you found any bitmaps with alpha-chanel in MM6 and MM8?

[redwoodtreesprite]

Where have you found any bitmaps with alpha-chanel in MM6 and MM8?

The plants, animation frames for the creatures and NPCS, weapons and such. And the paper dolls that you equip everything on.

Most have odd sounding endings like tga.bmp

Here's a good explanation I found for the textures:

In addition, some bitmaps can also store 256 levels of transparency - they have an ability to incorporate an 'A' channel - this channel is basically a selection or mask represented in 256 colours of the greyscale spectrum. While white stands for 100% opaque, black represents 100% transparent and the shades of grey in between represent varying degrees of transparency. This 'A' channel is the alpha channel.

I'm so used to making alpha-channeled tga and dds textures. And it surprised me quite a bit when I realized that these were bmps with transparent areas. I'm guessing they were done as bmps because of the 8 bit color format.