AH3 Skin help?

[Easyscor]

A few years ago, I was successfully including multiple vehicle skins in my terrains. I thought I'd give the new skin editor a whirl with the primary goal of learning the new texture system and with the hope of updating a skin that's laid dormant on my HD for almost a decade.

I exported the b17g, renamed the folder to b17g1 and renamed the exported diffuse, _S and _N textures to match. All looked good in the skin viewer when it listed b17g1 and "loaded it". I even added the text file with the submittal name of the "b17g" project so I wouldn't forget later.

Here's where I ran into trouble.
I expected the Diffuse map to be a 24 bit rgb bitmap with no alpha channel. The viewer exported a 16 MB diffuse bitmap suggesting 32 bits with an alpha channel. The _S (4MB grayscale) and the _N (16MB) files looked as I expected, along with the usual interior files we always removed in the past.

Some of you may already see where I went wrong, but I still haven't figured it out.

I opened the diffuse map in GIMP and confirmed it was a 3 channel rgb bitmap, so no alpha channel showed, just as I thought a diffuse texture is supposed to be. I wondered where those extra 4 MBs went, but accepted it at face value.

Eventually I wanted to see if my panel lines were matching up between the upper and lower wing members so I exported the diffuse texture and took a look. I expected the diffuse changes to show with the current _S and _N files but they didn't.

I tried every bitmap format available from GIMP and Ivew and haven't seen any change from the original default skin. I'd expect to get a black or gray model in the skin viewer if it were a problem with the diffuse format but no. Then I did a clean install of Beta 23 and started again.

After the clean install of Beta 23, it was rinse and repeat with no joy.

Then I came here and looked for anything that might suggest where I went wrong but if it's here, I haven't found it. I need to know what's supposed to happen so I know if my problem is GIMP, the Beta, my formatting etc. etc. etc.

Any help is much appreciated!

[Easyscor]

nm, I got past it.

[Devil 505]

What was the issue?

[Easyscor]

Way back when, if you wanted to view a skin in game, you added the next available empty slot number to your skin folder and the texture. At least that's the way I remember. Even though the Skin Viewer shows the folders and seems to load it, that's not what was happening for me. It went back to the default saved skin folder and picked up the texture from there.
Once I replaced the exported default texture in the b17g folder, the SV'r display changed on refreshing the screen. I started playing with the bit depth until I finally exported an indexed 256 bmp.

What the heck. Skins still require indexed bitmaps after all those red channel, green channel, blue channel instructions?! That's very confusing.

I went to post a whine in the bug forum and while I was whining, the SV'r was trying to keep up with my typing I guess. I got the Blue Screen and a page full of hex code. Suddenly, my whine didn't seem so important any more.