Problem showing transparent skins in FF

[KingFausto]

I'm sorry if this is the wrong place, I'm not too sure where else to put this..

I'm having trouble getting "transparent" skins to show in Freedom Force. Namely, in DrMike's mods, The Fly and M.A.S.S soldiers in The Strangers both have a big black cape with the wings visibly drawn in. From what I've seen, only the wings are meant to show in the cape.

If I'm not making sense, here's a visual example.

Picture of "The Fly" on DrMike's website.
Picture of The Fly's "wings" in my game.

This has also happened with Deadshot in the "Suicide Squad" mod. In game he has a large, clearly out of place, gaudy white cape.

I suspected this was a problem with male_alpha, however, in DrMike's "Tales of the Navigator" mod, "Optical Girl" (either female_basic or female_basic_effects) is apparently meant to have an invisible body, her suit and goggles being the only visible parts of the mesh. I can see the suit and goggles, but her body is a flat black, much like The Fly's cape.

Can anyone give me an idea of what's wrong, or how I could fix it?

[Haljack]

Try updating your vid card drivers and apply the patch to FF.

[UnkoMan]

I still get this problem with male_alpha, actually... but only on the cape.

Ever since I got my new (was new) computer. But everything else has been just dandy. I wouldn't worry about it too much, unless it happens on a bunch of other meshes. Obviously it is also happening on Optical Girl, but anywhere else?

But anyhow, I am of no help and Haljack's post was much better.

[KingFausto]

Try updating your vid card drivers and apply the patch to FF.

Thanks, neither worked though.

I still get this problem with male_alpha, actually... but only on the cape.

Ever since I got my new (was new) computer. But everything else has been just dandy. I wouldn't worry about it too much, unless it happens on a bunch of other meshes. Obviously it is also happening on Optical Girl, but anywhere else?

But anyhow, I am of no help and Haljack's post was much better.

Yeah, it's just aesthetics and really not a big deal, it's just a minor distraction and I wanted to see if there was a way to fix it. As for the other skins, I'm really not sure, as I don't download many skins and to the best of my knowledge, the only skins that I have that have transparent parts were the instances mentioned. Hell, for all I know, it's a problem with the mods.

[GogglesPizanno]

I may be wrong about this, but wasn't there an issue with the original male_alpha mesh that caused it to do that. I thought I remember them releasing a fixed male_alpha at some point to address this.

This doesn't explain the issues with Dr. Mike's meshes (unless they were based on the original male_alpha).

If you wanted to play around with them in nifskope, you may be able to fix those issues.
You might try looking on the modforce site to see if they have the updated male_alpha for download.

Or Ive just gone insane and am making stuff up...

[daglob]

One other crazy notion:

Maybe the cape file is saved wrong. I have fits with some of my alpha meshes (The Black Bat, The Missing Man, The Spectre [no relation, last two are Ditko creations]), in that I have saved the file wrong, and the alpha channel wasn't active (no matter how many times I selected it), so it didn't get converted in the .tga file. So black shows where it's suposed to be transparentl. So I save them again...

and again...

Just how DO you save the alpha files, anyway?

[GogglesPizanno]

In photoshop (off the top of my head), you need to make sure you have an alpha channel, save it as 32bit and make sure the check box for including alpha channels is selected in the save dialog.