Various notes related to the images.

### CREATING SHIELD TEXTURES FOR THE SHIPS

Steps to create the ico shield texture and the regular viewer shield
textures using a ship texture and gimp.

Oh, what fun that was.

## step one - to create the ico-sh texture for a ship.

- load ship texture into gimp.

- Colors -> Brightness/Contrast

  lower both to their lowest (-127) and apply.  Your ship is now a dim
  featureless gray blob.

- Select -> By Color

  click on your grey ship so it is selected.

- Filters -> Alpha to Logo -> Alien Glow

  Set the Glow size pixels to 250 (I am using 512x512 textures for the ships)

  Set the glow color to white (#ffffff)

- Now your alpha/background is screwed up.  Neat :)

  - in the Layers/Channels/Path window, select the background layer,
    (it should be the one that is all black, and labeled,
    convieniently enough: 'background') and delete it.

  - Image -> Merge visible layers

    select default (expanded as neccessary).  This should not change
    your textures size/resolution.  If it does then try one of the
    other options :)

- Now you've got a glowing black ship.  Next step is to delete the
  ship (hopefully leaving the glow).

  - Select -> By Color

    Check that the main gimp tool window is setup to 'select by
    color'.  de-select 'Select Transparent areas', and set
    the threshhold to something large (I was using 172.0).

    Click in a darker area of the ship.

    The whole ship should be selected, and the 'glow' should be
    unmolested.

- Edit - Cut

This should remove the ship leaving a 'hollow' ship-shaped hole
surrounded by a white, alpha-blended glow.

Save it as a new tga, and try it (modifying texturesrc to reference it
if neccessary).

## for the viewer texture:

   Using the texture created in the above step yields a texture that
   looks great in ico-sh, but hard to see in the viewer.  So we need
   to use a seperate texture for these, created in basically the same
   way above but with a few changes.

  - as before, start with a ship texture (or a copy of one to be
    safe).  The first thing to do however is reduce it's size by half.

    The view renderer will draw shield textures at twice the ship's
    texture size since we want the viewer sh textures to look more
    'fluffy' without introducing scaling issues.

  - 'rescale' the image in gimp:

    assuming a 512x512 texture: Image -> Scale image.  Set size to
    256x256

  - CTL-A to select the entire image, then Edit->Cut

  - Image->Scale image - this time back up to 512x512.

  - Then paste the image you previously cut, back in (Edit->Paste). 

  After that the steps for creating the shield tex are identical to
  those used to create the ico-sh texture with one exception: for the
  Alien Glow size, set to 500 rather than the 250 used for the ico-sh
  display.  This will 'fluff' out the shields some.  Looks much better
  in the viewer :)

  That's it.


