Accessing graphics in a .png file
 

Well, I decided to give this UI thingy a try.

Since my main is a Vah Shir Beastlord I decided to give xloredarkhelm's Vah Shir Beastlord skin a try.

I knew it wouldn't work right out of the box, so I started simply, by loading the files one at a time, and debugging as I went along.

I barely got started when I noticed that the graphics files weren't loading correctly. Specifically, the graphics from the PointerPieces.png file.

The other working UIs I have seen on the Mac do not seem to use .png files, rather they all seem to use the Targa (.tga) format.

I converted the PointerPieces.png to a .tga file, but still was unable to load graphics from the file.

Has anyone gotten graphics to load from .png files on the Mac yet?

PNGs support transparent backgrounds.
TGAs use alpha mask to cut out the background

If you opened the PNG and did not make a alpha channel mask before saving it, you will not see any of the graphics when you load it as a TGA.

just a tip that might help.

It turns out that the EQMac client is a little more picky with regards to the dimensions of the graphics file.

There is a graphics tutorial somewhere on this site that says the dimensions of your image file must be in powers of 2 (ie: 128x256).

Several of the images I downloaded for my experimental skin were of odd dimensions. Once I rounded them up to the nearest power of two, they loaded fine.

I assume that since these skins work on the PC side, the PC client allows the odd sized images.

The PC client will usually use odd-size images (assuming the moon isn't in the wrong phase and the correct number of sheep have been sacrificed to Sony this week), but we occasionally get weird bugs from them too. Mac code just tends to be a little less flexible (and hence more stable, once you finally do get it working) If you download anything with odd-size images, just resize them and they should load fine. You lucky people have built-in graphics editing programs, so that shouldn't be a problem. /sighs

Oh, and if you have anything over 512x512 pixels, we *strongly* suggest that you break it down into 2 or more smaller files.