One problem I have is when I alter a ship's diffuse texture file that is in dds format, the whole texture turns blue in game. I have been using the Nvidia DXT plugin for Adobe Photoshop CS and it gives you many different options to save a file as a dds. So maybe the mistake lies there? All I do is load the dds change the image slightly and save. Also, I have tried saving the texture as a tga and assign that to the mesh of the ship in the .mesh file. But that causes the same problem. So maybe it has nothing to do with the dds format?
The textures on the mesh have to be in dds. Check how the the textures are rendered or how they are hooked up to your material, perhaps you have hooked up the da - specular to your cl - diffuse. Also check that your alpha channel only has the areas where team colors are, lightened, the rest should be completely black.
My second question has to do with assigning weapons textures. Say two races share the same texture for seperate weapons. In that example I would like to create a new texture and have one race use that instead of the one it previously shared. Where is this done? I can't find any option for this in the entity file. Where are a ship's weapons and their textures linked together?
The texture files are within the texture folders of each version. Most of them are in the original sins version's folder. Chaos bolt and Star base, anti module and basicly everything that entrenchment includes are in the Entrenchment texture folder. If you want to change 1 - make a new texture put it in the texture folder of your mod. Then in the entity file, locate the weapon you wish to associate you new texture to, go to the line for eg., beamGlowTextureName "TechCapitalBeam_Glow" and change the name to the name of your new texture file. Other weapons like missiles have thier own mesh with textures attached. To change these just add textures of your own to thier mesh's. Or if you want to keep some ships firing the original and another with new different texture - Copy the relevent mesh paste it into your mods mesh folder and re-name it. Then add the name of your new textures to the relevent lines at the top of your mesh file.
Hope this helps some.
