UE2 - UT2kX UT2004 Fire/Wet textures

[ZotSindi]

I can make 'em but I can't get them to actually do anything.

I've heard that they are incompatible with UT2k4 but yet there's a whole U1 port that has working variants of these textures.

Also: http://www.xfire.com/video/432b32/ Showcases a fire texture that I'm pretty sure isn't available from U1.

I can modify existing U1 ones but only their palettes/source material, nothing else seems to effect them, I do not know if this has anything to do with having the U1 port installed or not.

There's next to no support for these textures, I've searched several times over the years and found very little besides the video above which gives me some hope.

I've tried contacting the person who made the video but they haven't responded thus far, so as far as actually making these from scratch I have no real idea how to actually START the effect and noone else seems to know either.

Another one is what exactly do I use for the palette of a fire texture? I've tried using the U1 palettes from the port but since I can't get the effect to start I don't know if that'll work at all, it seems to work fine when modifying the existing textures though.

 

[ZotSindi]

WELL getting back to it again i know how to duplicate these textures and create new palettes for them, i have whole packages full of copies of every single firetexture in U1 with different palettes

there is one property that actually works under "FirePaint" this tells me these textures ARE meant to be editable, but for whatever the other sliders aren't doing what they are supposed to, why this is i don't know


what frustrates me most besides lack of information is the fact that even if somebody knows how to do it, they will just not say anything about the subject or ignore you/make some condescending&mocking comment about how you aren't "special" enough (in their opinion) to know that information/"aren't their friend"/some other excuse or they already left/are almost impossible to contact

so i'm gonna start filling in the blanks for those who have the same issue as me, here's how you dupe the textures for editing...

basically create a new package, find the firetexture you want to dupe and RENAME it changing the package-name to the new package, DON'T duplicate it it doesn't seem to work 100% of the time sometimes the duped version is blank or buggy ... DON'T save the original source package when you exit... unless you like missing textures that is

now try and save the new package, if it says "file is read only" you have to edit the texture under "FirePaint", duped textures seem to need these properties to be able to save them:
bRising = True
FX_Area = 24
FX_AuxSize = 0
FX_Frequency = 16
FX_Heat = 161
FX_HorizSpeed = 45
FX_Phase = 16
FX_Size = 144
FX_VertSpeed = 142

setting it to that should allow them to be saved, since those setting are broke anyway it won't affect the appearance

however there is one setting that DOES work and that one is "RenderHeat" which either "brightens" or "darkens" the effect based on the colors of the palette

palettes can pretty much be made with bmp files (indexed color on exact-mode, forced black&white no transparency, in photoshop cs5) & messing around with the colors/directly editing the palette of the image, neat trick: you can assign them to one texture then copypaste the ID straight off the "palette" box and unto other firetextures, if you change the first one's palette, all of the other ones will automatically update to match


both water & firetextures can be used with combiners/finalblend/shader/panners .etc i haven't really found anything they won't mix with.... except.. hmm.. maybe where you can't seem to use anything except index color bmp files for the source texture/palette, so AFAIK you can't give them built-in alpha channels

i wish there was more support for these textures i've made some crazy cool effects with them that put the particle/standard textures+combiners/shaders system to shame (watertexture+alpha'd shader on a sheet brush vs. fluid surface... please not even fair fight... for the fluid surface that is), they lag less too from what i've seem, and you can make "flat-panel" meshes that use firetextures for easy torch-effects

that's all i've learned on screwing around with fire/watertextures directly in UT2k4, i haven't really messed with icetextures but from what i've seen their effect sliders are broken too

if i could code i would try and see if i could make a program that fixes all of the limitations/issues à la "morrowind graphics extender", i'm very disappointed that these types of textures are discontinued/unsupported in newer technology (AFAIK), they do alot of work really quick