Endless Paradigm

Hi all,

I'm fairly new to all this customizing icons stuff, so bare with me
I’ve successfully managed to use the RCOEdit program to open up the topmenu_plugin.rco file and I can see everything fine. (Great little app you wrote there ZiNgA BuRgA, keep up the good work.)

However, I’m having a problem getting the images extracted, that is, the images do extract to the directory of my choice and I’m able to open them up with MSPaint / Photoshop. The only thing is, I now want to edit these images so I can replace them later, but the black background (supposed to be transparent) in RCOEdit is now light gray and when I do a simple color editing in it the only colors I’m getting is gray or white.
I.e. I select blue and start drawing a line and thus a gray line appears.

Just to clarify: I don’t want to start with just a blank picture, but I want to actually edit the original icons from the topmenu file and for example give them a different color.

Is anybody able to give me a hint on what I’m doing wrong?

Regards,

Fiver.

Moved to help.

Your problem is alpha.  MSPaint can't handle it, so you'll need to use a program such as Photoshop.  Note that Photoshop is the only program that seems to work in my experience.

Thanks for the quick response.
I had already tried photoshop, but apparantely I had to use the 32bit bmp instead of the 8bit one to see the different alpha channels. :)

^^They actually are - MIG/GIM only accepts a 256 colour palette.  Only thing is, 8 bit BMPs don't support alpha (although there's a spare place for a channel).  It's the reason why I decided to upscale them to 32 bit to allow people to fiddle with alpha, if they wanted to.

(By the way, alpha is synonymous to transparency)