The final (hopefully) color -and logo of our flag poll

[ForesterSOF]

Leaders - binTravkin and Googlie

Emergency Player -

Domestic Path Advisory Council -
Graphics - Illu
Location Mmmt. -
Military Advisor -
Religion Advisor -
Social Advisor-
Tech Advisor -

Treaty Advisor -

City and their Mayors:

[Senethro]

Originally posted by ForesterSOF
Leaders - binTravkin and Googlie

Emergency Player -

Domestic Path Advisory Council -
Graphics - Illu
Location Mmmt. -
Military Advisor -
Religion Advisor -
Social Advisor-
Tech Advisor -

Treaty Advisor -

City and their Mayors:

Surely it would be more appropriate to have as the Domestic Path Advisory Council

Gaian Location Mmmt. -
Spartan Military Advisor -
Believer Religion Advisor -
Hive Social Advisor-
University Tech Advisor -

Peacekeeper Treaty Advisor -

[Illuminatus]

I like the way Senethro is thinking for the base names.

Ugh, the poll is closed.

I have a transcend icon with transparent background - I can post screenshot of it when I return home today (around 21:00 GMT).

As for the transcend icon note that my avatar and transcend icon are two different things. See this and this. As you see my avatar turns out poorly, so ordinary project icon is better. Also I can convert another icon (like Voice of Planet) to .dds now if you are not dead set on transcend icon. I'll post the orange screenie tonight and if not, I guess it is black and white?

[Illuminatus]

Umm I've been having trouble. I am using the mod Snoopy369 posted in main forum and first thing it does is report errors in xml when loading. The second problem is that now every flag I load has lightblue background, despite the orange color. I don't have time tonight to find out what is wrong (or better said, reinstall everything) so here are the flags in case someone wants to test them (the Hive's been lost due to sloppy file naming).

[snoopy369]

Oh, the xml errors are my fault, due to version incompatibilities probably. They shouldn't affect initial game starts or flags showing up.

The light blue background ... do you have < bWhiteFlag>YES< /bWhiteFlag> set? That's usually the reason. That, or you didn't set the Alpha channel properly when you converted to a DDS file (must be set to BLACK).

[snoopy369]

Illuminatus, i should be here tomorrow during the day (no work, yay!) my time, ie evening your time, to talk about this stuff if you want, just find me on gtalk or irc ...

[snoopy369]

Screenshots follow. I had no trouble getting them to appear right, when I added the black alpha channel. You had alpha channels that were more "appropriate", in theory, but were no correct for Civ4's usage of them. All alpha channels must be 100% pure black for the entire square (not black around your image). Otherwise you have unpredictable (well, probably predictable by someone who knows what they mean) results.

I'm preserving the filename of the file in the .zip when I do these screenshots, if you want to see which DDS is used.

[snoopy369]

Okay, indeed the alpha channel is responsible for the blue as far as I can tell. That blue is iirc your secondary color, and if you use an alpha channel that's going to show up anywhere white exists on the alpha channel.

This is an example of what happens when you leave white in the alpha channel. You can do this on purpose if you want - by taking a white 128x128 and putting black pixels everywhere you have a nontransparent pixel in your image. Any pixel that's black will be presented as is in your 128x128 bmp, and any pixel that's white in the alpha channel will be presented as background color (secondary color).

[snoopy369]

Here's transcend ... I took the core image and removed the whitespace around it.

[snoopy369]

Here's Tao. I am not sure how to resize this into its own flag (probably giving it whatever color you want as filler instead of blue, or even blue if you want, it's your secondary color), so I left the alpha on.

[Senethro]

Hey, look at the purdy pictures. I think the Tao symbol is looking the best now.

[Illuminatus]

You should have read this thread first. You would see that this kind of screenshots were already posted and your work with taking screenshots has been in vain.

Okay, indeed the alpha channel is responsible for the blue as far as I can tell. That blue is iirc your secondary color, and if you use an alpha channel that's going to show up anywhere white exists on the alpha channel.

Our secondary colour? I followed instructions from here and it did not mention secondary colours when creating flags. How do I set the transparency to use the primary colour? Perhaps by setting the same value for primary and secondary colour?

This is an example of what happens when you leave white in the alpha channel. You can do this on purpose if you want - by taking a white 128x128 and putting black pixels everywhere you have a nontransparent pixel in your image. Any pixel that's black will be presented as is in your 128x128 bmp, and any pixel that's white in the alpha channel will be presented as background color (secondary color).

Silly Snoopy. I obviously know about that since I already made flags (b/w transcend) that operate with black alpha channel.

[binTravkin]

Indeed, so let's vote, and snoopy, once you come here to finish with this, just look up which has the majority by that moment and take that.
I vote Tao

[Illuminatus]

No voting until I learn how to set flags to use primary colour.

[snoopy369]

Illuminatus, I wanted to post pics of the dds files you'd created. Otherwise people can't really see them Why post the dds files otherwise?

The secondary color MUST be different from the primary color; this color is used in other areas of the game. The easiest way to do it is to simply put your own orange in. There may be a way of doing it with the alpha channel; I have no idea. (Do things other than black or white mean anything in the alpha channel?)

The reason the wiki doesn't discuss it, is that the wiki (well as of the last time I read it) assumes you have an all black alpha channel, and if you do, neither primary nor secondary color matter.