Read Kasdia's Overhaul Guide, which talks about the DDS plugin. I don't actually use the recommended settings, though- I use DXT1, no mipmaps, so that I can get greatly increased texture resolution with minimal download size and memory footprint. Kasdia's Guide walks you through the plugin's basic features, though, and will teach you about DTX3 (which is mainly useful if you need alpha channels- DXT1 doesn't support them).

Don't use the plugin that comes with it, though- get the latest version from nVidia, it's better.

And... um... if making/modifying ships is your thing... learn everything you can about using UTF Edit and HardCMP. HardCMP almost doesn't need instructions, but UTF Edit... is a mysterious beast, until you've learned a few things. I should write up a tutorial about it- the instructions that came with it assume that whoever's using it already knows a lot about the inner structures of UTF files (this program's been around since the Dark Ages of FL modding, when people were still doing things with hex editors). Still, it's not that bad, once you understand that you're looking at data trees, and that some data is always a Float, some data's always an Integer... and some of it's Strings. For working with ships, it's mainly used for things like glow maps... and there you can either look at the UTF structure of the existing ships, or look at one of mine- the only tricky bit is things like the Ec setting, which is a Float, and the Whatever_flags (Dt, Et, Ot), which are always Integers, and are always:

64
0

Since I had to learn that the hard way, I thought I'd share. For all I know, it's in a part of Drizzt's tutorial that I ignored

Edited by - Argh on 5/27/2005 7:48:19 PM

It sure wasn't. There's a lot missing from that tutorial, but it's all we have.....for now. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA *rubs hands together*.

I can't wait to start texturing my new ship (a one man cargo runner), I plan on using glow maps, windows and some interesting things for transparencies. (If I can figure it out that is.)