How to make a Pipboy screensaver

Posted by nisen on 06:25, 12 March 2011

intro

hey, not a modder myself and dont yet know the ins and outs of dds files, but came across a dead easy way to make dds images for things like screensavers/wallpapers and some posters ingame.

I wanted to know using the pipboy Readius Pipboy Readius where images show rotated 180degrees, so wanted to save them as rotated images, and found Paintnet paint.net which can open dds files and convert them back to Fallout 3 compatible format, along with several other image formats like bmp, gif, jpg, png, tiff & tga by default

Tutorial

if you want to to try it, just save an image format as dds and in the save configuration menu, change DXT1 (Opaque/1-bit Alpha) to DXT3 (Explicit/Alpha) and tick the box to Generate Mip Maps; For screensavers it needs to called screenglare and goes in the textures/pipboy3000 or textures/scorptec/readius folder.

also standard size is 512x512 which can be increased by fractions like 640/768/896/1024 but its distorted in game roughly 30% vertically so need to use a stretched image: for the standard size 160 pixels works allright, and can also use other methods like squashing horizontally or a combination so might use images that are say

512x512 (resized 160) stretched vertically from 312 or squashed horizontally from 672 or stretched from 432 + squashed from 592

or 640x640 (resized 200) stretched vertically from 440 or squashed horizontally from 840 or stretched from 540 + squashed from 740 etc, so depends how large the image your using is. and there doesnt appear to be any lag using upto 1024x1024 that ive checked.

at least on the Readius things also appear a lot brighter (which might be duller on the 3000) and can lose some color; sharpness also takes a hit but get better results sharpening after its stretched/squashed

the general rule with visibility ive found is image that have alotof detail over the entire surface are hard to use, just too busy, but alotof detail itself isnt bad if not blocking certain parts like inventory and would say its just common sense not to use anything too detailed/bright/colorful at the very center, just really distracting