[Windcatcher]

Very nice tutorial. Now that I've read it I think I remember why the client has problems with the fringes. I think it has to do with using bilinear or trilinear filtering. They allow the engine to blend texture pixels so they look...well, less pixelated, but it also means that the adjoining mask color will bleed into the pixels that are visible. I think this is also the cause of the lines that you get at the edges of your textures -- the filtering also causes the pixels from the other end of the texture (e.g. the trunk of the tree) to blend across the texture edge to the other side.

You shouldn't have to edit eqzoneviewer's .INI settings to manually load a zone. It has menu entries that let you load a zone manually from any folder. Now if it would only not blow up on my ATI Radeon x800 Pro so I wouldn't have to run it from my laptop...

Another way to deal with transparent tree textures is to start with a 24-bit .BMP file and click File...Convert to transparent bitmap. It pops up a dialog where you can select the input and output texture filenames. When you click Ok in the dialog, it will look at the pixels in the four corners of the input .BMP file to determine the transparency color (choosing the color that's most prevalent as the transparency color). It then creates a new 32-bit .BMP file where the alpha value is 0 for the transparency color and 255 for all others. This technique assumes that your external 3D modeler can read this texture file, but this way the tree textures really will show up properly in OpenZone. The issue with the color of the fringes will still remain, however.

I'll look into the bugs you found. I could have sworn that I had fixed the issue with newly exported mesh objects not showing up in the mesh list...