This tutorial will cover the steps required to get a custom texture working in your mission. It is assumed that you have already made the image, and if necessary, it will tile seamlessly.

Textures should be in one of the following formats:

• .DDS
• .PNG
• .TGA
• .BMP
• .PCX
• .GIF
• .CEL

The texture’s dimensions can be up to 4096 x 4096. Height and Width do not have to be equal, as long as each is a power of 2, (e.g. 2, 4, 8, 16…).

You need a fam folder, inside which you need one folder for each family. You can use c:\…\Thief2\fam, but NewDark comes with built-in FM support, which has FMs installed in a subfolder. A texture could have a path of the form c:\…\Thief2\FMs\YourFanMission\fam\walls\bricks.png.

There are no restrictions on how you arrange textures and families, so you can group them however you want, e.g. fam\bricks\ or fam\grass\.

NOTEME To enable built-in FM support:

• fmsel.dll has to have been extracted from contrib.zip in NewDark’s download zip file.
• Open Thief2\cam_mod.ini and remove the ; from the line ;fm.

To load your texture, you can either add the entire family, or add the single texture.

Press Alt and T to bring up the texture palette window. Right-click and select Load. Go to Family to load all of its textures, or go to Texture to pick a specific one:

or

NOTEME Those two menus can be merged into one. Right click, go to Options and select Merged Load Family/Texture Menu:

In the white status bar at the bottom of the Dromed window, it should then say Added Family or Loaded single texture.

Don’t be tempted to compress your texture palette just yet. It won’t do any harm if you do, it’s just a precaution in case you accidentally save and reload your mission without saving the gamesys. In such a case, the textures would end up in the Missing section of the Object Hierarchy and you’d then have to move them back to the correct place.

Open the Object Hierarchy, and select Textures from the Show Tree menu at the top:

At the bottom you can see the newly added texture. Above you can see existing material groups. Select your texture, the click and drag it to desired material:

The texture will then disappear from the current window. Open up MetalTex and you should see your texture at the bottom of the subtree:

This is the part that confuses a lot of people. The Textures Tree is stored in a .gam file (a.k.a. the gamesys). By default all missions use dark.gam, but once you start making changes it is very sensible to use a new gamesys and leave the original intact.

There are two things to do:

• Save the new gamesys
• Associate it with the mis file

From the File menu, select Save Gamesys and choose a suitable name. Save the file into your Thief2\ folder, or Thief2\FMs\YourFanMission if you’re using the build in FM feature. Once the gamesys has been successfully saved, the status bar should look like this:

On the left is the most recently saved file, and the next item is the currently associated gamesys.

Even if your mission already uses a custom gamesys, it is best to save as a new gamesys anyway, because then you’ll have a working backup.

In the command box, type the command set_gamesys custom.gam (replace custom.gam with your own gamesys name). The status bar should then read:

Now all you need to do is save the .mis file, so from the File menu, select Save Mission. It is best to save it as a new .mis file and so that you can use the previous one if things go wrong. After that, the status bar should then read:

To ensure that everything has worked, reload the mission. You can then go into Game Mode and ensure that the texture makes the correct sounds.