Hi, I have questions.

[Particlese]

Where exactly are you getting the white square?  I get one for my creature when I press CTRL+E in the level editor, but it looks fine everywhere else, oddly enough.  If you're getting it in the animation editor or everywhere, I have more questions for you:

Did you save the picture of the fish as a PNG file in the "graphics" folder of your mod and refer to it without the extension?  In other words, do you have a file like ".../aquaria/_mods/mymod/graphics/fish.png" and an xml file that has something like this?
    <Bone idx="0" gfx="fish" pidx="-1" name="body" fh="0" fv="0" cr="0" cp="0 0" />
I know that's pretty much what's in the tutorial, but sometimes rewording it helps.  (You can also have your file as ".../graphics/fish/body.png" and use "fish/body" in the xml file if you want, which is even closer to the tutorial.)

If your set-up already looks like this, there might be something funny about the png file itself.  To test that theory, try copying one of the original game's graphics and put it in place of your "fish.png" or whatever you've named it.  If that fixes it, there's something wrong with your png file, and we can work from there.

[Maria]

Hmm... I really don't know where I messed up.

Going to start from scratch.
This time though, I am going to not animate and just show the picture.

Agh, I feel like I made no sence there.

Edit: Haha, now it shows in the Animation, but in the plants or creatures it show a white square still.

[Particlese]

Glad you got it working!  I can't find any posts on that last white square problem, but if I figure out what's causing it, I'll let you know.

[Maria]

Thank you!

I did it again, to know what I did wrong. I went back to the game and sure enought. It was a white box.

When I went to the animation the monster/creature  was there.
But I noticed, and should of said this earlier, that the monster/creature had white on the background. My first monster had it too.
 You could tell the shape of the box.
Like Naija, she didn't had it, like the background was transparent.

How do I get the back ground transparent? maybe that is the reason I see a white box when I pick a monster or a plant.

[Titch]

You need to set an alpha channel on the images you are using. How to do that depends on what kind of image program you are using. A lot of imaging programs confuse transparency and alpha channel/mask.  You could probably just put google it to get the specifics for whatever program you are using.

[Maria]

Hm... Okay, this time I used Gimp2.
I found a picture of a Pepper and it worked in the animation.
But I still get a white box on monsters or plants.

  What am I doing wrong.

Thank you for the help, Titch.

[Particlese]

I would also love to know if anyone else has entities showing up properly in the CTRL-E menu.  I've tried subbing in graphics and scripts from Aquaria and comparing several scripts and animation files, but what I've tried so far hasn't fixed it.  It's not much of a problem when you only have a few new creatures, but if you had a whole screen of white squares, it could get tedious finding the right one.

[Edwards]

I would also love to know if anyone else has entities showing up properly in the CTRL-E menu. 

The preview images that are shown for the built-in entities are defined in the entities.txt file in the scripts/entities folder of the data files.  I haven't tried adding a similar file to a mod myself, but you may want to look into that.

- Edwards

[Particlese]

Hmm, that sure looks like the right file, but Aquaria doesn't seem to do anything with it when you put it in:
_mods/mymod/scripts/entities/
_mods/mymod/scripts/
_mods/mymod/

I looked in the debug output and grepped for "entities" throughout Aquaria, but I couldn't find anything interesting.  Maybe the code for overriding or appending this file just isn't there.  I didn't see anything in the modding guide, either.

[TheBear]

rpg_elena naija/mithalan-head
rpg_naija naija/teen-head

"rpg_elena" is that actual name of the entity. Whatever you place after that becomes the icon displayed in the map editor window. So "naija/mithalan-head" is found in gfx folder, naija folder, mithalan-head. This is obviously declared in the entitygroups.txt

[Edwards]

Ah, so all you need to do is add a path to the image to use as a preview just after the entity's entry in entitygroups.txt.  Of course, now that I know what to look for, that's demonstrated in the example mods, but thanks for pointing it out!

Anyway, regarding Maria's last post, it sounds like what's going on is that you are getting a white box surrounding the whatever image you're trying to add, right? (like this: )  If so, what you need to do is convert the background of your image from white to transparent.  It should be possible to do this by using the magic wand tool to select the white background, and either cut it out (edit menu->cut) or delete it (delete key?).  There's also a rather long illustrated tutorial here, although it seems rather more complicated than it needs to be.  I wish I could be more helpful, but my copy of the Gimp is crashing spectacularly every time I try to launch it.

If your problem is that the entire image is pure white, it's probably a formatting error.  Make sure your image has dimensions that are powers of 2 (6, 32, 64, 128, etc.), and that you're saving it as a .png file in the graphics folder of your mod, and that you're using the correct name in the animation file (that is, don't include the extension, so for "image1.png", you would use the name "image1").

- Edwards

[Particlese]

...This is obviously declared in the entitygroups.txt

That did it.  Thanks!

Another way to add transparency in the Gimp (if your image doesn't already have it) is to go to the "Layer" menu, then select "Transparency", followed by "Add Alpha Channel".  Now you can do as Edwards said and select the parts you want to be transparent and press delete.  To fine-tune it, you can also use the eraser tool.

[Maria]

Hi, sorry that I haven't replied for some time.
Got busy.

But let me show you what I get.


This one is in Animation, I finally got the back ground transparent. (Thank you Edward)

But now I have another dilemma.
Every time I go to Entity group I get this.
Yeah, I made the non-active group, because I thought "Maybe they are in a wrong subject".
And I made two more to figure out what I did wrong.
I don't know what I missed.

Thank you for the help!

[Particlese]

Open up "entitygroups.txt" in your mod's main folder.  It should look something like this:

GROUP:Non-Active
Carrot carrotparts/greens
Pepper pepper

The two things to check are that:
1.  the part on the left matches the entity's name.
2.  the part on the right matches the texture you want to see in the Entity Group screen.  In the example above, the texture ".../mymod/graphics/carrotparts/greens.png" would represent Carrot, and ".../mymod/graphics/pepper.png" would represent Pepper.

Does that fix it?

[Maria]

Thank you!
That helped  a lot!

But now, ever time I paste it, instead of showing the pepper, it shows Naija's head. 

I have looked in ModGuide, but I don't understand.
Do I open the .lua file to make a script to make it appear?