DDS Editing?

[Zirconia Wolf]

First a little back story: I'm a long time fan of CB games (COTN in particular) who is also a Sims 2 (TS2) addict. I have just recently re-connected with my beloved CB games (Zeus/Poseidon, Emperor, COTN, etc) as I hit a temporary creative block in regards to my beloved Sims 2 universe & needed a "sanity" break. I even went ahead & upgraded to the Alexandria expansion, no less than 1 hour ago. (Better late to the party than to never arrive at all, right?)

Anyway, now that I am getting back into my COTN groove I find myself wanting to try some re-texturing of my own (something I was heavily into with TS2) and having failed miserably at my "key word search" of the forums, I thought I would humble myself & just ask if anyone out there would tell me how the heck one edits the COTN DDS files? I have the nVidia DDS Utilities already, but am only familiar with it's DXT functions (as that's what TS2 uses) so..?

Also, I'm a happy PaintShop Pro X3 user- so is that going to be a problem? I have zero interest in mortgaging my house just to get PhotoShop, but am not opposed to installing another (less expensive) editor if needed.

Any help would be greatly appreciated! (And again, I'm very sorry if I missed a blatantly obvious thread on this very subject!)

[Keith]

Because you have Paint Shop Pro, you'll probably have to pickup a freeware editor from the internet. I forget the exact name of the one I have used. It converts the DDS files to TIFF and TIFF to DDS among other formats. You have to convert the DDS file to some format that PSP understands, then reconvert the retextured file back to DDS. A search on "how to convert dds to tiff" should bring up enough information for you to get started.

[Zirconia Wolf]

So it's the "extract, convert, tweak, re-convert, import" technique, is it?

Not a problem. Done a lot of that before.

I shall commence looking for a DDS friendly converter thingy at once- thanks for the tip!


***edited to add***

Found me a (free!) converter that handles DDS files! Weeee! (No TIFF option, but does BMP, JPG, PNG, etc, so I should be all set!)

[Horus_TOP]

Hey there,

I know this is quite an old thread, but I would like to add a very useful programm, which is available as freeware.

It's called Paint.Net and it's the one I am using for the retexturing project.
Easy to handle, quite a lot of functions and for free.
And it can really handle dds files without any problems!

download: --> http://www.getpaint.net/

Regards
Horus_TOP

[Keith]

I found and used a program called DDS converter (I think) when I made my textures. It will convert the DDS files to BMP format (and TIF, I think) which you can then edit with programs like Paintshop Pro and Adobe. I think Photoshop has the built in ability to covert DDS files. I think I read that somewhere.

DDS coverter is a very small EXE file and is simple to use. A web search should find it.