Talk:Book Formatting

Well, I'm stumped. I'm trying to insert an image into a new book of my creation, so I have a new mesh and textures for the book and a new icon. In the book formatting I've followed the Book Formatting tutorial exactly. In the CS I've got the correct assignments made and the image files are placed correctly in the Textures\Menus (all 3)\Book\ directories. Each of the 3 sized image files are set to exacting requirements as per the size they go to. The .dds files are in multiples of two for their image size, have correct alpha channels, and match the percentages according to the menu size exactly (all matches taken from already existing ingame books to make sure it is perfect). I've tried saving them in DXT5 interpolated Alpha with mipmaps and DXT3 explicit Alpha without mipmaps. Neither works.

What does work is my mesh, textures, and icon are represented in the game world correctly. I open the book and can see the text typed in, but no image. I then duplicated the contents of another already existing book that matches the size and specs of my book (also matched the same sized image) and their contents don't appear either! Mind you it was book to book (not a scroll or note, which I noticed were more often used with large images then books were) with the same original mesh and texture sizes. In game a cell reset did nothing either. It strikes me that everything works fine, but the images (created or original), which leads me to believe it has to do with those .dds' themselves.

Any new ideas or experiences would be welcome. Thanks, Gristle-TL

Update: Okay, I finally figured this out with the help of the article, "How to make a book with pictures only". Three things were required that on my first three days of working on it were not yet present... First of all I could never get the image to appear until I followed Pekka's advice of including the extra formatting tags directly in front of the image lines and the period after the last image line. According to the Book Formatting article you should have been able to use the other common tags, but you can't- Pekka was correct there. Secondly, I could never get the image to appear if you didn't put the internal picture .dds' in their own unique folder. I was originally trying to keep them in the default BethSoft book folder, but apparently a subdir was needed. Lastly, Pekka mentioned (not demanded) that the width of the image should be 480. In fact I could move it all the way up to 490 and it would still work. Good for those images you need to squeeze the maximum resolution out of. At 491 (or anything higher) it will crash the game at the moment of book opening. Thank you Pekka and other Book Article authors! Gristle-TL

Format change Mitijea 14:24, 10 June 2006 (EDT)