Transparent Titles

I'd like to make some new titles for my WAD but whenever I make my own (using paint) they lose their transparency and turn into blocks. How do you make transparent titles?
Thanks
NT

I'm not quite sure what you mean by "transparent titles". Are you using an outline font or is it the same old problem of text strings having a visible background after importing? If it's the latter, one way around the problem is to export an image from the IWAD (which will have the Doom palette) and use that as the base for your titles - resizing as required.

i think i know what you mean. use the color cyan () for whatever you want to be transparent

NaturalTvventy said:

I'd like to make some new titles for my WAD but whenever I make my own (using paint) they lose their transparency and turn into blocks. How do you make transparent titles?

Not with MS Paint.

If you use a lump editor such as WinTex, XWE or SLumpEd, they have a convention of turning cyan pixels into transparent pixels when they convert the picture to the Doom format. This is the source of the widespread, but erroneous, belief that cyan is transparent in Doom. It's not transparent in Doom, it's transparent in XWE and co; provided you use such tools to import the picture in a wad and convert it to Doom's graphic format.

Some ports can work with other image formats as well, such as PNG, JPG, TGA, DDS, etc. Cyan will not help you there. If you use such a format, you need to apply transparency to the image itself (provided the format does support transparency, PNG does but JPG doesn't for example); and that's not something you can do with MS Paint; use Paint.NET or the GIMP for that instead.

SLumpEd actually doesn't turn cyan pixels in imported graphics transparent; importing a graphic with cyan in it and then using SLumpEd to convert it into patch format (Convert to Doom Graphic) will just result in the cyan pixels being turned to whatever palette shade is closest to cyan. (In the standard Doom IWAD palette, this would be white.)

Oddly enough, though, it does display pixels of color 247 in patch-format graphics as transparent, which it shouldn't, and which makes no sense whatsoever.

esselfortium said:

Oddly enough, though, it does display pixels of color 247 in patch-format graphics as transparent, which it shouldn't, and which makes no sense whatsoever.

If I remember correctly, entry #247 in the Doom PLAYPAL is a duplicate of entry #0, both of which being absolute black ($000000). Since they are duplicates, some people believe that entry #247 is Doom's "transparency indicator", though it is not (it's probably just an oversight).

Doom does not have a transparent index in it's palette; Doom graphics are allowed to have space in which no color data exists.

So you can't make transparent titles with SLumpEd? that's what I use, and I'd rather not switch mid-WAD 'cause I've had issues switching from SLumpEd to WinTex.

Thx,

NT

I still can't figure this out. When I convert a title with the cyan background it turns it white. I try loading it into WXE and converting my .png into a doom graphics, but then I can't figure out how to save the thing. any help?

NT

Ok I was messing around and found some things out. You can import textures with transparent backgrounds in SlumpEd if the image is a 32-bit PNG but you cannot make that in MSPaint. If you're stuck with MSPaint then you'll have to use XWE to import transparent graphics into your wad. In MSPaint use cyan for the background and save it as 24-bit BMP then XWE will make the cyan transparent.

edit: actually if you save the image as a PNG in mspaint, XWE will work with that too.