Making
a custom kit icon for Ghost Recon
Report by Jester
Several people have emailed me and asked
in the GhostRecon.net forums about how to make a new kit icon
for a weapon that they have made. It's really quite simple.
This step-by-step tutorial will show you how. This tutorial
also assumes that you have made a mod with a new weapon or
kit for Ghost Recon, and are at least a little familiar with
PhotoShop.
Tools
Before you dive in and get started, make
sure that you have the proper equipment for the task at hand.
You will need the following:
- Adobe
PhotoShop (You can use Paint
Shop Pro, but I'm not familiar with it, so I don't cover
it, here.)
- The Rogue Spear .rsb plug-in
- Mike Schell's Ghost Recon RSB
Conversion Utility
- A suitable image of the weapon or piece
of equipment that you are making a new kit for.
Getting Started
The first thing that you will need to do
is make a copy of one of the existing kit images from Ghost
Recon. If there is a kit that is similar to what you want
to add to the game, then pick it. To figure out which image
to use, check which kit number it is in-game, then go to the
Ghost Recon\Mods\Origmiss\kit\ folder and choose the appropriate
kit. Open it up with notepad (note: you can edit or create
a new kit with Igor, but it won't show you the information
that we're after, so bear with me.)
For this example, I'm going to make an AK-47
and grenade kit. Since the Support 2 kit has grenades, I'll
choose it. The file I'm after is Ghost Recon\Mods\Origmiss\kit\heavy-weapons\heavy-weapons-02.kit
When I open the .kit file in Notepad, the
third line is:
<KitTexture>kit_heavy-weapons-02.rsb</KitTexture>
That tells me what I need to know. Now,
go to the Ghost Recon\Data\Shell\Art\kit folder and find your
image. Mine is Ghost Recon\Data\Shell\Art\kit\heavy-weapons\kit_heavy-weapons-02.rsb
Copy that .rsb file to a temporary folder
and change the file properties so that it is no longer read-only.
Next, open up Ghost Recon RSB Conversion Utility and locate
the folder that your .rsb file is in. GR-RSB should display
"RSB's in folder: 1". Click on the "GR to RS"
button and it should convert it and say "Completed".

The Image
Open the .rsb file in PhotoShop and you
should see something like this:

Go to the "Channels" tab (it's
next to the "Layers" tab) and open it up and you
should see something like this:

Click on the small square to the left of
the alpha channel to make it visible. You should see
this, now.
Select the alpha channel by clicking on
it. Copy and paste the lower box over the top box so that
your image now looks like
this
Next, take your new weapon image and make
a white silhouette out of it.
I did it by selecting only the weapon and
filling it in with white. Pretty simple. If you need help
with doing that, then look for some PhotoShop tutorials and
come back to this when you have a better grasp of the program.
Next, resize your image to fit in the top
box of our kit image and copy and paste it into the alpha
channel.
Save your new image as newkitimage.rsb in
Ghost Recon\mods\your mod\\Shell\Art\kit
Open your new kit up in Notepad, just like
you opened the heavy-weapons-02.kit, and change the KitTexture
to "newkitimage.rsb".
Now, you should see your new kit icon
in-game
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