I'm working on a texture pack for Minecraft. It's not going to be anything super amazing, but it will be made by me and using my Mac laptop. I've had a few issues that I was able to solve, so I figured I should spread the knowledge by making a post here.
First of all, it's helpful to have the basic images to start from (for image sizing if nothing else). On a mac, those are located in /Users/<username>/Library/Application Support/minecraft/bin in the file called "minecraft.jar". To get at them you need to extract the contents of the minecraft.jar file. Probably the easiest way is to copy it and rename it minecraft.zip (click use zip in the popup) and then double click it. This should give you a folder called "minecraft" that has pretty much all of the data you'll be interested in using for your texture pack and a lot of other files you won't care about.
The method I use is to create a new working folder for my texture pack and only copy the images I'm interested in changing as I work on the pack. The first most interesting file is "terrain.png" and it has pretty much all of the terrain images that are used in rendering the world. Others of the textures, such as the skins for creatures and the player, are found in inside directories and should be placed in directories with the same names in your texture pack.
The final step for your texture pack to work is to compress it. On the mac, this is most easily done by selecting all the files inside your texture pack directory (the one with terrain.png at the top level) and right clicking then selecting "compress" from the dropdown menu. This will create a file called, "Archive.zip" that you should rename to be whatever you want your texture pack to be called.
I hope this post will be useful for other people trying to make texture packs on their Macs. I'll share some of the image editing software that I've found useful once I get a little more time to try it all out.
Could you get those programs in ASAP? Like Just a list of ones that allow you to use a "clear" texture. I'm leaving the country in a day or 2 and would really like something to do on the plane. :)
ReplyDeleteWell, for free there's always "The Gimp" but it requires an install of X11 to function and doesn't really use native windowing for the mac. "Paintbrush" is a free simple pixel editing tool without tons of bells and whistles, but it works quite well for what it does. If you want to use some filters to modify the images you could also check out "Image Tricks." A google search for any of those terms should get you the download link on their respective websites.
ReplyDeleteI have paintbrush, but I'm not sure how to draw the clear part. Do you know what I mean?
ReplyDeleteHonestly I haven't used paintbrush enough to know how to add transparency to pixels.I know you can do that in the gimp. Looking around the internet it seems like paintbrush can only load images with transparency already built in but cannot add transparency on its own.
ReplyDeleteThanks, I figured out what to do.
ReplyDelete