need help with editing skins

[made5]

i wad trying to edit the vanilla julii hastati skin, i dunno whats wrong with my rtw but the julii hastati dont have shoulder pads, not like the other factions. so i browse thru the models and saw that the texture have the shopulder pads. i convert it to png, i gave them the shoulder pads i took from the senate models in photoshop, i convert it to tga, and then to dds.
i started my game, the shoulder pads appeared, but there was a new problem: the front-left person of the unit (next to the centurion) had this black square on his cheeks.
i tried to edit other units, and the problem that occured is the same. it seems everytime edit the textures, the person in that position will have that annoying black square on his cheeks.
anyone knows the solution for this?

oh and theres one more,
i was eager to use ferres' roman skins cos they look really cool, i put them on. and when i tried play it, those skins just slowed my game. i dont have this problem with the original vanilla skins. i've tried to edit it (reduce the size from 512x512 to 256x256), but it didnt work, my game still runs slow, especially when there are many of them in the battlemap. i disabled the gloss mapping, lower the unit detail to low, but its still the same.
can anybody tell me whats the difference between ferres' skins and the vanilla skins that affects frame rates?

any help really appreciated!!!

[Halie Satanus]

i wad trying to edit the vanilla julii hastati skin, i dunno whats wrong with my rtw but the julii hastati dont have shoulder pads, not like the other factions. so i browse thru the models and saw that the texture have the shopulder pads. i convert it to png, i gave them the shoulder pads i took from the senate models in photoshop, i convert it to tga, and then to dds.
i started my game, the shoulder pads appeared, but there was a new problem: the front-left person of the unit (next to the centurion) had this black square on his cheeks.
i tried to edit other units, and the problem that occured is the same. it seems everytime edit the textures, the person in that position will have that annoying black square on his cheeks.
anyone knows the solution for this?

It's a known bug in the game, I don't think anyone ever solved it.

oh and theres one more,
i was eager to use ferres' roman skins cos they look really cool, i put them on. and when i tried play it, those skins just slowed my game. i dont have this problem with the original vanilla skins. i've tried to edit it (reduce the size from 512x512 to 256x256), but it didnt work, my game still runs slow, especially when there are many of them in the battlemap. i disabled the gloss mapping, lower the unit detail to low, but its still the same.
can anybody tell me whats the difference between ferres' skins and the vanilla skins that affects frame rates?

any help really appreciated!!!

Are you sure it's only a skin and not a model?, a unit with a high poly model might slow your machine if there's enough of them in a battle, but a 512x512 skin shouldn't have any effect.

[made5]

i guess its a model, cos it came with the cas files.
well, i should upgrade to a new video card then.


are u sure theres no way to get rid of that annoying black square?
i spent about 5-6 hours exporting and importing, but still havent got a clue.


thank you so much for the response...

[Halie Satanus]

Ah, well are you playing with the units on huge?, if so just use smaller unit sizes, other than that, yeh new graphics card.

You could try adding _m to the model_flexi line of the unit in the dmb, you only need to add that to the highest detail Lod, as it's the only one you see close up. It might work.

so it would read

type barb_female_peasant
skeleton fs_dagger
indiv_range 40
;model_flexi_m data/models_unit/barb_female_peasant_300.cas, 8

[made5]

okay thanks very much, i'll try it.

and ive finally found a way to get rid of that black square by using photoshop dds plugin and saving it with dtx5 compression.

cheers

[Squid]

That black you saw sounds like you didn't save the alpha channel when saving the file. As long as you save it as either a tga or dds file you are able to save the alpha channel. DDS is preferable since it's more compact, but both file formats support alpha channels.