Bullethead

A finsihed, playable, uploadable skin has no layers. It's all 1 layer, everything there as 1 single image. Layers are only individual entities while using a graphics editor that supports layers. When you save your skin in the format used by the game, all the layers are "flattened" into a single layer, which is then applied to the 3D model. The process goes like this: 1. You start with an existing skin, which is only the 1 layer. 2. You convert it into a file format that supports layers. For instance, OFF uses DDS files for skins. Unless you have an editor (or a plug-in for your editor) that allows direct editing of DDS files, you have to convert it to some other format to be able to do anything to it at all, especially if you want to use layers. Most editors have their own proprietary file format for this purpose. For example, I use PSP 7, the proprietary format for which is PSP, and there's no DDS plug-in for PSP 7. So, for me, the process is first to use DXTBmp to convert the DDS file into a BMP file. Then I open that in PSP 7 and save it as a PSP file. Once it's a PSP file, I can use layers on it. 3. You do whatever editing you want to do in the proprietary format. This is where you create layers and do your work on them. Saving the file at this stage in the proprietary format keeps all the layers intact so you can keep on editing each one individually. 4. When you want to check your work in the game, or when you're finished completely, you have to convert the file back into whatever the game uses (in OFF's case, DDS). So, if you can't work on DDS files directly, you have to convert your proprietary format into DDS. In my case, I save my PSP file as a BMP. The BMP file as zero layers--it's everything "flattened" into 1 layer. Then I use DXTBmp to convert this BMP file back into DDS so I can see it in the game. So, as you can see, whether you start with an OFF skin or a 3rd party's skin, all you have is a 1-layer DDS file with no separate layers. The only way to get the skinner's working layers is if the skinner gives you his proprietary format file that has all his layers in it. Otherwise, you just get the "flattened" version.

One of my favorite songs Problem is, you can't make a dungeon in Lousy Anna because you can't dig a hole that deep without hitting water, and even if you could, there's no stone to shore it up with. Lousy Anna is nothing but mud all the way down to Hell, where there's a thin layer of baked mud brick just above the fires. So we do all our torturing above ground, usually back out in the swamp someplace

Ja! "Sometzink else" be-ink not flying der verdammt tzink!

I disagree. The stalemate on the Western Front was the result of the size of the armies then available compared to the available space. On the Western Front, army frontages spanned the entire continent so there were no flanks to turn, let alone room to manuever beyond flanks. Thus, everything there had to be a direct frontal assault. As a result, the ONLY way to break the stalemate by offensive action was to find ways to 1) utterly smash what was directly ahead, 2) move enough troops through the resulting hole faster than the enemy could move reserves to plug it, and 3) communicate in real time with forward troops and their supporting arty well enough to exploit opportunities created by successfully accomplishing steps 1 and 2. As WW1 on the Western Front went on, the armies got pretty good at step #1 to start with and then step #2 by the end of the war, but they always broke down on step #3 provided the enemy was still willing to fight. There are many examples of this failure to communicate aborting what might have been major breakthroughs. In fact, problem #3 was never overcome during WW1, the final Entente advance being yet another wide-front offensive just like all those before it, and would have been no more successful if it had happened at any time before the German army fell apart from the long-term effects of attrition and the blockade. It really wasn't until WW2 that problem #3 was solved. Now compare the Western Front with the tohers. Where similar ratios of troops per mile of useable front prevailed, things where similarly stalemated, such as Gallipoli, the Gebirgskrieg, etc. But on the Eastern Front, even offensives that ultimately fell short of their strategic goals still often covered several hundred kilometers at less cost than an advance of a half-dozen kilometers on the Western Front. This was because there WAS room to maneuver there. And in East Africa, a handful of battalions managed to play hide-and-seek over truly vast distances for the whole duration of the war without ever coming to a decision, because they had so much elbow room.

Sure, Moltke the Dweeb set the table with his faulty decisions, but he'd have gotten away with it had it not been for Breguet. Without the air recon reports, the French wouldn't have known there was a gap to exploit and thus stop the Germans. In previous wars (for example, the Franco-Prussian War), similar gaps had always developed but nobody knew about them in time to exploit them. And for the benefit of the OP, THIS is why you'll never write your paper on this subject. Myself and HW and most of the others here have spent decades reading up on this sort of thing and arguing about them in forums like this, but we still can't agree on key details. You'll suffer the same fate should you pursue this research topic

I used to work for the company that makes CM but haven't played it since I left them. Not that I don't like it, I just haven't had time. I'll have to get back into that. Hell, I don't even know what "Battle for Normandy" is. Is that a remake of the original CM, "Beyond Overlord" ?

I hope this class is one you're taking over the summer or even next fall, and not one with a paper due in the next few days. Once you get into reading about WW1 aviation, it's hard to stop. First you'll get general histories, but they're usually well-laced with quotes from pilot memoirs and of course have extensive bibliographies, so you'll want to read all those sources, too. And then you'll find all sorts of contradictory info so will have to read more and ask questions in forums like this, and before you know it 20 years have gone by and you still haven't touched pen to paper because neither you nor anybody else equally well-read can be 100% sure about certain key issues . As to your specific questions, I can sum things up like this: Most folks say WW1 aviation had no significant impact on WW1 ground action, in that the ground war would have played out the same way it did without airplanes. This isn't true. In August 1914, it was an airplane that noticed the gap between the German armies near Paris, which led to the "Taxicabs of Paris" moving an army into the gap and thus stopping the Germans at the Marne. This caused the "Race to the Sea", and that ultimately resulted in the stalemate that ensued for the next few years. Thus, the entire Western Front stalemate was the direct result of 1 airplane (incidentially, it was the prototype Breguet AG 4 flown by Louis Breguet himself) in the right place at the right time. Now, after late 1914, when the trenches were in place and the stalemate had set in, aircraft ceased to have any significant effect on the ground war. But NOTHING ELSE had a significant effect, either, for several more years. That's why there was a stalemate for so long. The best airplanes in the world couldn't change this, but neither could the best infantry and artillery tactics, nor the introduction of poison gas, flamethrowers, submachineguns, hand grenades, trench mortars, and tanks. So IMHO, the so-called "failure" or aircraft to break the Western Front stalemate, despite their rapid pace of development, must be measured agains the identical failures of advances in ground warfare weapons and tactics. As to chivalry, they were just as chivalrous as anybody else before or since. By that I mean that very occasionally, when circumstances permitted, somebody might show mercy to a crippled foe or respect to a dead enemy, but usually it was bloody murder. And remember, the knights of old who wrote the code of chivalry spent most of their time during wars in raping and pillaging peasant villages (economic warfare, IOW), not fighting each other. They most only fought each other under controlled circumstances during peacetime tournaments.

That looks much like my eindecker landings. Did it fall sideways out of the sky on him, too?

First off, the lack of cucumber sandwiches will do nothing but improve tea time. GAWD, the horror of having a good afternoon ruined by those horrid noshes! Personally, I find it extremely hard to understand the current English fixation with cucumber sandwiches. Not so long ago, they knew better. Here are, for example, the erudite and sagely words of the immortal Samuel Johnson: "A cucumber should be well sliced, and dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out, as good for nothing!" How did the current generation stray so far from the truth? I blame the Great War, which killed off most who knew better, and then the rationing of WW2, when apparently there wasn't anything better to eat. As to the Vicar, in the US the Church of England is called Episcopalian, better known as "Whiskey-palian", because "when 3 or 4 are gathered together, there shall be a fifth (as in 1/5 of a gallon of whiskey) in the midst of them." It's even better since the merger with the Lutherans, who bring the beer. I imagine, therefore, that if you offered a cup of tea to a vicar, he'd dump half his pocket flask into it and would want to drink it with beer nuts and a cigar.

I've never used Paint.net so can't give you specifics of its interface and commands, but I think it works in general the same as the high-dollar editors so the overall concepts should care over. In this case, yes, that's certainly a layer. See, you use the original skin as either the background (iif you're just adding personalization to it) or the next one up from the background (if you're doing a total repaint), then do all your actual work on layers above that. That way you can separate your work so can change individual items without affecting or screwing up other parts. Anyway, one of the things about layers is that you can set each layer's opacity to a different amount. In this case, it sounds like Ohlam set the stripe's layer's opacity to somewhere in the region of 80-90% (the rest being transparent). This is just enough translucency to let underlying details show through but still leave the upper layer nice and solid-looking. Speaking of layers, when I'm doing a total repaint, I typically end up with 50-60 separate working layers. Like for the wings, I'll have 2 sets for upper and lower surfaces. Then for each set, there will be separate layers for the base color (bare canvas or paint), the aileron control surface hinges, the shading to fake 3D ribs if necessary, the rib tapes, the national insignia, and then any weathering like mud splatter, paint scuffs, etc. So that's 12 layers to do the wings (6 each for upper and lower surfaces). I might include the upper and lower surfaces of the horizontal tail in these, too, but often they work better on their own layers (so that's another 12 for that). And so on. There should be what's usually called an "eyedropper" tool. The button looks just like an eyedropper. If you put this on an area of the desired color and click, it will set that pixel's RGB value to your current color. IOW, it's like that paint is still wet and you're sucking up a bit of it. Then change to one of the painting tools and apply that color elsewhere, since it's now your current color. A few notes of caution on doing this, however. First off, the opacity setting of a layer affects the RGB value of the color, in that the original RGB values assume 100% opacity. As you decrease opacity (making the layer more see-through), the color gets lighter. So like if you start with 100,100,100 on a 100% opaque layer, then change the layer to 80% opacity, the RGB values will change to something like 120, 120,120 (I really don't know the exact numbers, I'm just giving an example). But the eyedropper picks up the RGB value that's displayed, not what it originally was before you played with the opacity. Thus, if you were to eyedropper this area now, you'd get 120, 120, 120 instead of 100, 100, 100. So let's say you're taking Ohlam's skin and want to add more stripes of the same color elsewhere on the plane. You're working with a complete skin so the stripe is now part of the background image itself, no longer on a separate layer. Because it's slightly translucent, it's acutally a lighter shade than what Ohlam originally used, but you'll get the lighter version in your eyedropper. So, you do that and paint some other part of the plane that way, then set that opacity down so it's just as see-through as the original stripe. This will lighten the color again, so your new stripe will be lighter than the original. Another thing to beware of when eyedroppering is that quite often adjacent pixels in the same area of the plane are slightly different colors. This is done intentionally by most skinners to give the skin a more natural look. For instance, on all my skins, I have a layer I call "clouds" which is a sort of static-like layer of black, blurred dots with a random density scatter. I turn the opacity of this layer way down so you can barely see it, and the result is what looks like natural grime, water stains, and whatnot. The underlying paint shows through this, but each little black, nearly invisible dot filters the color of the paint there, so I have hardly any adjacent pixels of the same exact color.

A case of top-shelf whiskey and the time to drink it. P4 and the time to play it. A new desktop to play P4 (and various other new games) on. An extremely large and diverse live-in household staff of nubile, compliant young women.

A friend of mine has an airplane so I recently got some aerial pics of the local area. http://http://www.flickr.co...57626733860896/ Nothing traumatic but still slightly dramatic. And of course still waiting on which will win over the long haul: the levees or the weight of high water.

That is the 1st time I've ever heard of the words "wonderful" and "Pomp and Circumstance" being used in the same sentence,and I daresay I speak for everybody in the entire history of the world . GAWD, I still have nightmares about that horrible piece of music . See, in the US, "Pomp and Circumstance" is played at high school graduations. And it's played over and Over and OVER AND OVER again throughout the ceremony, for several hours if the school is big enough. It's especially bad if you're an underclassman in the school band, so have to be one of those playing it. You have to suffer through this for 3 years in a row, when nobody you care about is graduating so you wouldn't be at the show except for being in the band, and never mind that you have your own exams the next morning that you can't study for because you're playing that damn "Pomp and Circumstance!" Then, when finally it's your turn to graduate, the whole evening is ruined because you have to listen to the current underclassmen playing that horrible song ad nauseum.

I've been looking at trhe P4 screenshots and while they're quite beautiful, I'm a bit concerned about what I assume are supposed to be London's defensive barrage balloons. What I'm seeing looks like something from WW2 during the Battle of Britain, but from what I can tell, in WW1 things were quite different. I've attached a pic from The Sky on Fire, by Raymond H. Fredette, which is about the Gotha and Giant raids on England and the British reaction to them. I highly recommend this book. It's got a wealth of data on the defenses in the London area to stop these raids. Anyway, the P4 screenshots show low-altitude balloon barrages similar to those familiar from WW2 photos. That is, relatively small balloons upholding only their own tether cables, a forest of which from many balloons formed the defense. However, AFAIK, this arrangement wasn't used at London in WW1 (although it was used elsewhere in WW1). This is because these low-level balloons were there to deter low-level attacks, strafing, and divebombing. In WW1, however, London only faced high-level bombing so a different arrangement was required. What they did was to make "balloon aprons" of 3-5 balloons each. As shown in the pic, these balloons were connected by horizontal cables high and low, between which ran long vertical wires. These vertical wires were 1000' long, so give some idea of the huge size of an apron and its balloons. Several such aprons were then arranged in a line, forming a literal wall in the sky across the enemy's line of approach. The balloons usually flew at 7,500-10,000 feet high. Hence the name "barrage", because "barrage" originally meant a barrier to enemy movement. This barrage was strung across the NE corner of Greater London, well inside the primary lines of guns and fighter patrols, as a sort of final line of defense. Their primary purpose was to make the Germans fly over them at a more or less known altitude, which greatly simplified setting AA shell fuzes and directing fighters, plus made the bombing less accurate. So There were never many of these balloon aprons, however. The 1st was made in September 1917, there were 4 by January 1918, and only 10 by the end of the war. The primary defense was guns and aircraft. The 2nd pic shows a map of the whole area covered by the defenses of London in their final form. The darker shaded areas were the 1st built during the latter 1/2 of 1917 and into early 1918, while the lighter shading was installed later in 1918 as guns became availalbe. The system worked as follows: Aircraft were tracked by sound and all aircraft heard within gun areas were assumed to be enemy. Within the gun areas, the guns fired pre-determined curtain barrages across the path of the enemy, shifting to new curtain locations as the bombers advanced. Within the fighter areas were both planes and searchlights. Pilots attempted to find bombers to attack by watching shellbursts, searchlights, and also lighted signal devices on the ground below.

Yup, you usually can't even see fhe fire itself, just an indistinct glow, but the audience has to see the actors you know . I mean, if you realistically depicted the cliche'd scene in every fireman movie where the main characters are arguing in a fire whether to go foward or retreat, it would be a black screen with only some muffled grunting and unidentifiable thumping and bumping going on for a while. Talking is pretty much impossible due to the air masks and you can't see hand gestures, so firemen mostly communicate with punches, pushes, pulls, and playing tug-of-war with the hose, none of which can be seen, either How well is that going to work for the dramatic crisis of the whole show? Sure, somebody's always selling their property and moving elsewhere. I'm just saying cost of low ground + levee probably = cost of high ground, with the trailer being a wash. We have similar problems, although our levees mostly have clay cores. Our main tunnelers are crayfish and our grazers are cows. And one of the main tasks of the cows is eating trees and bushes before they get big enough for their roots to become problems. Even so, the levees only go so far into the ground and the underlying soil usually isn't clay but silt. Thus, water tends to get under them to a greater or lesser extent, causing "sand boils" on the outer side at the bottom. This is where water flows through fast enough to cause wet sand to boil up out of the ground. These are always quite worrisome because they can quickly undermine the levee, so there's an army of guys (soldiers, state workers, private contractors, and jail inmates) going around reinforcing these areas as fast as they can. They'll be doing this for the duration or until a levee fails somewhere and makes further work pointless.

Here in Lousy Anna's armpit, the Rapture did in fact occur as scheduled at 1800 local time. Needless to say, none of the present living inhabitants were taken up, but countless corpses came out of ancient graves and the flood-swollen Mississippi River. All these zombies began queing up for takeoff clearance down the main street of St. Francisville like it was no big deal, but unfortunately for them they chose to surface in the midst of heavily armed Lousy Anna rednecks who've seen enough zombie movies to know where to aim. So for about 30 minutes, it was Zombie Apochalypse made flesh, but with the overwhelming numbers on the side of the gun-toting living humans. When the last zombie's head exploded, the living celebrated with a crayfish boil and beer bust while comparing scores. All in all, a typical Saturday night in Lousy Anna's armpit. There are a few more headless zombie corpses strewn about than usual but not enough to be particularly memorable. It's like how some years have somewhat more mosquitos, rats, hurricanes, malaria caes, etc., than usual. This is voodoo country, after all

Yup. I keep seeiing on the news how Memphis, TN, and Vicksburg, MS, are flooded, and they show pics of flooded houses (mostly actually doublewide trailers). It's like at St. Francisville-towns on the east side of the river are on bluffs, so only their low-lying surrounding areas, known since colonial days as being flood-prone, are actually underwater today. It's hard to feel sorry for folks who live there because they knew this when the moved in. I find highy amusing is pics of doublewide trailers whose owners have surrouned them with private levees. Sometimes these have worked, sometimes not. But because such levees cost more than the doublewide trailers they protect (or attempt to protect), there are a number of questions left begging. Such as... 1. If you have enough money AND time to pile that much dirt around your doublewide, why not tow the doublewide to higher ground instead? 2. In the alternative, given that much time and money, why not hire a piledriver and crane to siink and put your doublewide up upon stilts higher than the water will ever come? 3. In the alternative, given only that much money, why buy land in known flood zones instead of something up safely on the bluff? 4. Did you get UACE and/or USCG approval to build a levee in a navigable watewar and/or federally regulated wetland? Can you afford the fines for not doing so? Can you also pay the fines for violating local fire codes for blocking access to your doublewide by fire apparatus? Can you pay the fines for violating local health ordnances RE: creating a stagnant, shallow pond in an area rife with malaria, yellow fever, and West Nile virus? 5. Assuming you'll owe all these fines when the water goes down and business returns to normal, not to mention the initial cost of your levee itself, can you live with your wife's nagging because it did'nt work anyway, so all this expense was for nothing?

A few more pics taken today--same link as above. These show the river pretty much at its crest here, which is only a couple feet higher than it was several days ago. This is the effect of opening the Morganza Spillway for us. Instead of cresting at 65.5 feet on 23 May, we're cresting at about 55 feet tomorrow. We're within a few inches of that already. That makes a big difference for us. It really won't change how many of our buildings flood because only those on the low ground were going to regardless. However, they'll have a lot less water in them. This will probably keep the houses in my pics from washing away, which was a distinct possibility with 10 feet more water (because they're in a fairly high current area). It will also save some of our local industries, a factory that makes forklift pallets and a papermill. The pallet factory is on slightly higher ground than the houses in my pics so only has a few inches in some parts of it, meaning it would have been 10 feet under if they hadn't opened the spillway. The papermill is further downstream, in the SE corner of the parish, so the crest there is lower than at St. Francisville, and it's surrounded by its own levee. However, it's levee probably wasn't going to be tall enough. As it is, there's still a question of whether it will hold for the duration, but both businesses are still in operations today. BTW, here's another example of how governments always screw things up. In Lousy Anna, "parishes" (aka counties) are run by a "police jury" (aka board of county commissioners). Anyway, the other day our "police jury president" (aka head dumbass) was being inteviewed on TV and said St. Francisville had 25 feet of flooding. This of course is totally untrue--even the batture areas in my pics have only 10-12 feet of water over them in the deep areas and only a couple feet over the raised roads down there. And besides, the town itself is way high and dry--it's just the batture that's flooded. But of course, this is only known to locals, so those elsewhere had to go by the guy who supposedly knows the most. Problem is, the main industry hereabouts is tourism, so all the folks who had reservations for this week canceled. This raised a big stink, so now the police jury is spending my tax money on a crash TV commercial blitz saying we're really not flooded.

I never new RFC recon types lived long enough to bother keeping a logbook ;)

Yeah, quite ironic. The worst part is, although the farmland in the soon-to-be-flooded spillway area will get well-irrigated, it probably won't be like the ancient Nile floods in terms of leaving good new topsoil for next year. The expectation is that mostly the River will leave worthless sand there, ruining vast expanses of fields and pastures. I just uploaded some more pics. These were actually taken before the others, on 13 May, when I drove over the floodgates of the Morganza Spillway. This was about 24 hours before they opened, so the level of the water leading up to them was as high as it's ever been.

One of my Mount and Blade characters. http://www.taleworlds.com/

That is the 64 trillion dollar question: when will the Mississippi River change course? It's not a question of if, but when. It's only still where it is now because humans have worked extremely hard for a very long time to keep it there. Besides the Old River Control Structure, they do MASSIVE amounts of dredging on a daily basis in the present channel in an effort to keep it lower than the Atchafalaya. But the more water comes down the river, the more silt it brings, so the worse things gets. I expect that right now, during this high water, it's silting up much more rapidly than all the dredges in the world can keep up with. Humans have both helped and hurt the situation, too. As mentioned, the various things in my part of Lousiana are all intended to keep the river where it is now while preventing highly populated areas from flooding. However, for most of the River's length, the Corps of Engineers many decades ago put a LOT of effort into straightening the River out, cutting canals through meanders and such. While this had the short-term benefit of vastly reducing the distance barges have to travel from New Orleans to Chicago, it's meant that the River's current has become faster because it doesn't have so many turns to go through. This means that it causes more levee erosion dlownstream AND also doesn't drop much silt upstream. Thus, not only are levees downstream faced with more erosion than initially expected, but nearly all the slit from all the US between the Rockies and the Appalachians, and from the Great Lakes to the Gulf, gets carried down the River to Lousy Anna. There the River hits the oceans and suddenly stops, so the silt all gets dumped from there up to New Orleans, so that's the stretch that gets the most dredging. Meanwhile putting levees along the River has caused another problem. While it's kept cities and farmland dry, it's also prevented the River from rebuilding the surrounding lands. See, before the levees, at times like this the River used to flood vast areas below New Orleans, dumping the silt over thousands of square miles. Thus, the area got fresh topsoil and also kept pace with erosion from the ocean and subsidence into the ocean. Without this yearly layer of silt, the areas beside the River are sinking and being washed away by the ocean at its present level, let alone if it rises any more due to the ice caps melting YET AGAIN (as they have many times in Earth's history before Al Gore came along to take the credit for it). So south Lousy Anna is rapdily disappearing and the Gulf is moving north. The land being lost is mostly swamp, which is turning first into salt marsh and then shallow sea. These swamps used to be a big buffer zone for hurricane storm surge protecting all the cities, towns, refineries, what have you south of the line from Baton Rouge to New Orleans. Now the surge has much easier access to these places. Over the last few years, as this problem has become more apparent, they've been trying to dump the silt dredged up from the River's channel into the surrounding areas, but there's no way they'll ever get enough transportation to move that much dirt, let alone enough dredges to create enough dirt to really make a difference. So at the bottom line, Lousy Anna as we know it today is a terminal patient on failing life support. In the not too distant future, the Mississippi River will be flowing a short distance down the Atchafalaya, where it will soon enter the Gulf of Mexico at about the latitude of US Hwy 190.. Before much longer, the bluffs of St. Francisville will be beachfront property. On the plus side, however, there will be excellent fishing at the many artificial reefs just offshore, where Baton Rouge, New Orleans, and everything else south of St. Francisville used to be. I say, hasten that day because New Orleans and Baton Rouge at least both deserve such a fate. Once the River moves to the Atchafalaya, there won't be any need for those places anymore anyway. BTW, note that even when the River stays more or less in its present position, it still changes course by cutting off its meanders and moving a few miles the other way. On the Corps of Engineers map linked above, you can see several such oxbow lakes. There's a big one under the words "Pointe Coupee", which is called False River, which happened many centuries ago. But there's another about the same size that happened in the mid 1800s. The heavy gray dashed lines are parish (aka county) boundaries. See the loop the boundary makes between the W in "West Feliciana" and the N end of the straight brown line of the Morganza floodgates? The area within that loop is Raccourci Island (pronounced "Rack-uh-see"). The River itself these days goes straight across the neck of this loop just left of the W in "West Feliciana". As you can see, this happened in recent times, AFTER they'd set the boundary between West Feliciana and Pointe Coupee. In fact, Mark Twain says it happened in his day, and that when Raccourci Old River (the oxbow lake) got cut off, there was a steamboat trapped in the loop. They got to one end, found it cut off, so reversed course and found the end they'd entered by cut off as well when they got back there. So after that, there was a ghost steamboat in that oxbow lake, constantly going back and forth looking for a way out. Some folks claim to have seen it in recent times . Someday the same thing will happen to the Cat Island swamp, unless the River moves to the Atchafalaya first. It might be occurring even now, and will become apparent once the flood goes down.

Here are some pics you all probably haven't seen on the news: Batture Looking W from Catholic Hill, 15 May 2011 The town of St. Francisville is built on a high bluff on the east bank of the Mississippi River, completely safe from the flood. This pic was taken from the W edge of both the town and the bluff and is looking W, so the town is behind me here. We call this spot "Catholic Hill" because the Catholic church is built right there--I'm standing at the edge of its parking lot. The Mississippi River meanders a lot and is actually flowing W-E as it goes by the town, so this view is looking upstream and parallel to the normal channel. The normal channel is about a mile off the left edge of the pic. Between it and the bluff is an area of batture that floods every year to a greater or lesser extent--this year it's flooded completely. There used to be a small city down there (under the trees in the left background) called Bayou Sara, which in the 1800s was the largest port on the Mississippi between New Orleans and Natchez, but it washed away completely in the Great Flood of 1927. Since then, only a few structures have been built down there: about 6 houses and 1 small industrial complex, plus a bar. All of them flood every few years so folks are well aware of the problem and live accordingly. All the rest of St. Francisville is up on top of the bluff behind me. Until a week ago, a road came down from Catholic Hill, just to the left of the flooded houses here, then angled off through the site of Bayou Sara to the ferry landing. This ferry was the only place to cross the Mississippi between Baton Rouge and Natchez. For the last couple of years, however, they've been building a bridge a few miles downstream from St. Francisville to replace the ferry. It wasn't supposed to open for a couple months but they had to rush it through because the River was rising so fast. This put the ferry out of business ahead of schedule because the access road flooded out. Batture Looking SSW from Catholic Hill This is looking off to the of the pic above. The submerged road is the one that used to go to the ferry. The house you see here stands on stilts about 6 feet above the ground, so that tells you how deep the water is. Incidentally, in the Great Flood of 1997, the water got up to the window sills of this house, at about 53 feet, which was the previous record and we're not quite there yet this time. However, we're expecting about 63 feet by next weekend now that they've opened Morganza, so I suppose the water will reach about 1/2 way up the roof this time. But hey, that's what happens when you build in a flood plain. Baton Rouge Looking NNE from I-10 Bridge This is about 45 miles as the buzzard flies SE of St. Francisville, but more like 60 river miles due to meanders. Here the River is flowing N-S and is expected to crest at about 45 feet next weekend. The levee here is about 48 feet tall and you can just barely see the top few feet of it as a tan line between the water and the buildings. This is why they're concerned, because naturally the tops aren't as thick as the bottoms and aren't faced with concrete. Already they're getting sand boils under the levee here all along down town Baton Rouge, and this high water is going to be here for weeks to come. Opening Morganza is only going to help this a tiny bit. In the left background, the tall spiky things with steam coming out are the towers of the huge Exxon-Mobil refinery, about the biggest one in the US. Many of the US's other refineries line the River from here on down to New Orleans. All of them are threatened with flooding, which is one of the factors currently driving up the price of gasoline. Atchafalaya River Looking S from I-10 Bridge I-10 crosses the Atchafalaya Basin between Baton Rouge and Lafayette, on a 20-mile long bridge across the whole swamp. In the middle of this swamp is the Atchafalaya River itself, which some thousands of years ago was the mouth of the MIssissippi River. Thanks to the Old River Control Structure, the Atchafalaya always carries all the Red River's and 30% of the Mississippi River's flows, so is pretty impressive at all times. With both those rivers at historic highs now, so too is the Atchafalaya. As you can see, the lower branches of the trees on both banks are in the water, meaning that the river is over its banks and spreading for miles to either side out through the surrounding swamp. This pic was taken the day after they opened the Morganza Spillway, but that water won't reach this spot for another day or 2 (due to the distance between), so what you see here is just what's been going on before. Corps of Engineers Flooding Map This is part of a map published last week by the US Army Corps of Engineers showing the expected amount of flooding if they opened the Morganza Spillway, which they now in fact have. I have the whole map but it's a 10meg PDF file so I've so far only uploaded this little bit of it. Anyway, I put this up here to show how this whole thing works. In this pic, the heavy black dashed lines are either levees or (in West Feliciana Parish) bluffs. So in West Feliciana, everything SW of the dashed line is batture or swamp, almost totally uninhabited. So even though 1/2 the parish is underwater, it happens to some extent every year so no big deal. The actual spillway runs from the floodgates at Morganza to the Atchafalaya at Melville, a distance of about 20 miles. From there, the water runs down between levees 20-40 miles apart surrounding the whole Atchafalaya Basin, which is also almost all swamp. As you can see, towns in the basin have ring levees around them for just this set of circumstancs, so should mostly be OK, assuming the levees hold, but that's the question everywhere. The reason the Corps open Morganza's gates is because the levees leading to it from the Mississippi River were being overtopped. If they got, then the whole Mississippi will fulfill its dream of returning to the Atchafalaya.

Thanks for your concern but it's not necessary for me personally. Lousy Anna's armpit is a plateux containing most of the highest ground in the state. Except for the batture areas, everything is at least 100 feet high sloping up to 250 feet. while the Mississippi River is only going to get to 65.5 feet here next Sunday. So me and mine are high and dry, and laughing at those across the River who live in low areas :). But only out of 1/2 our mouths because if the flatlanders have a major problem, we'll have to go help them. But for now, we're just on standby. Now, I have a few words to put things in perspective..... The Morganza Spillway is directly across the Mississippi River from where I live. On Friday, the day before it was opened, I drove across the very Morganza floodgates that the media is going on about now. I can post some pics if anybody's interested but I figure you all have seen it on TV by now. But the important thing for you all to know is that the media is lying when they say this spillway was opened to save Baton Rouge and New Orleans at the expense of rural areas. The expected height of the Mississippi River from here on down was actually expected to be BELOW the tops of all levees, and opening the the floodgates will only reduce the height downstream by about 2 feet, not enough to make much difference anyway. The REAL reason they opened Morganza was because the water was starting to come over the tops of the levees between the Mississippi River and the Morganza floodgates. If this was allowed to continue, then those levees would have failed and areas outside the Atchafalaya Basin would have flooded. And in that case, the Mississippi River would have gone that way and not come back. Here's something that's not widely publicized but is a fact of life.... The Mississippi River no longer wants to turn SE at my location and go through Baton Rouge and New Orleans to its current mouth. Instead, it very badly wants to head back down its ancient channel, now called the Atchafalaya River. See, over the millennia, the Mississippi has pivoted around the high ground where I live. About 20,000 years ago, it kept going straight south down the Atchafalaya, then about 10,000 years ago it shifted SSE to what is now Bayou La Fourche, and then about 5,000 years ago it shifted to a due E course past what is now New Orleans. The delta it made then cut what is now Lake Pontchartrain off from the rest of the Gulf of Mexico. Since then, it's pivoted twice at English Turn just downstream of New Orleans, first creating the "toe" of the Lousy Anna "boot", and finally swinging back a bit to the south into its present mouth. But rivers lay down silt, so what was once the lowest ground eventually becomes higher, making the river want to seek a new path of least resistence. And right now the Atchafalaya Basin is that path. Just upstream of where I live is the Old River Control Structure, intended to prevent this from happening. It funnels all the Red River ([previously a tributary of the Mississippi) and 30% of the Mississippi's flow down the Atchafalaya River. IOW, it bleeds off just enough to keep the Mississippi flowing where it does now, but it's at capacity and can do no more. Someday it will inevitably fail and then the Mississippi River will go down the Atchafalaya, leaving the major ports of Baton Rouge and New Orleans high and dry. This is expected to happen within the next century or so, and will of course cause major economic dislocation if no preparations for it have been made. Such preparations include making Morgan City the new big port, but that hasn't even begun to be a wet dream yet, primarily due to politics of the current big ports. After all, that's where the money in the state now is, making Morgan City a backwater small town in the shrimping and offshore oil business. Sorry to digress into local politics, but Lousy Anna is all about corrupt politics so I have to mention it in passing. Bottom line is, if they hadn't opened Morganza, the change of the Mississippi's mouth would have happened right now instead of decades or centuries hence, and nobody is ready for that to happen yet. So that's why they opened it. NOT TO SAVE THE CITIES! PERIOD. And EVERYBODY with at least 2 brain cells knows NOT TO BUILD between the flood levees of the Atchafalaya Basin, because the floodgates can be opened any time. So I can't feel sorry for anybody who has built a home there, and you shouldn't, either. This is not to say, however, that Baton Rouge and New Orleans aren't in danger. Although their levees are tall enough even without Morganza being opened, this high water is not only a record high, but it's going to last 4-6 weeks. That's a LONG time for the levees to hold that type of pressure and nobody knows if they can because it's never happened before. And every day, the levees and the land they sit on are getting more and more saturated. Already, a week before the crest, the levees in Baton Rouge are showing weakness, so it'll only be a matter of luck if they hold. And remember, this was going to happen even WITHOUT opening Morganza. I drove through Baton Rouge today and the river was within about 4 feet of the levee tops, WELL above street level on the other side. They're so concerned they haven't been allowing folks to drive on the levees or the roads adjacent to them for the past week, and have even stopped pedestrian traffic, too, so I could only see this from the I-10 bridge, looking down on it. I've only seen the River nearly this high once before, back in the 1973 Flood when I lived in New Orleans, but it didn't last nearly as long as this is supposed to last, and wasn't quite as high. But I say again, where I live (north of St. Francisville on US Hwy 61), things are just fine. The batture areas around St. Francisville are flooded and have been for a week. The Cat Island swamp and NWR has been flooded for about 3 weeks and all the coons, possums, deer, turkeys, coyotes, alligators, snakes, wild hogs, bears, and panthers that live there have been moving uphill into my area the whole time. The Angola Prison, in the batture but surrounded by massive levees, has been evacuated just in case, so all of Lousy Anna's worst murderers are living in a tent city about 5 miles away, but I've caught escapees before and can do it again. Besides, I haven't had the opportunity to kill a worthless human being in a bit over 20 years now so I've got a huge jones for it . Anyway, all is well, my powder is dry, and this isn't expected to change. Worst case is we get an early hurricane while all our creeks and bayous are backed up with the flood water, in which case we'll have a number of low-lying areas flooded rapidly enough to require help evacuating. Otherwise we're just on standby to help the topologically challenged folks downstream, where the water won't be as high as it is here now, and we've got a week to go before we crest.

The Gimp has never worked for me, primarily because I've never thought the colors came out right. I've never tried that other free thing mentioned so can't offer any advice on it. I use Paint Shop Pro 7 but the Nvidia plug-in that allows work directly on DDS files only works for PSP 8 and above. Thus, I have to use DXTBmp to convert from DDS to BMP, use the BMP as the bottom layer in a PSP file where I do the real work, save that as a BMP, and use DXTBmp to convert that back to a DDS useable by the game. But at least my colors run true throughout, so I'm happy, and this process is no harder than working with any proprietary skin format that doesn't have a plug-in you can use, so I've been used to this for many years. There are quite a few accomplished skinners in this forum, and there's a separate forum here at CA for OFF skinning and modding help and tips. I recommend looking through the download library of skins to see whom you think is the best, and then pester those guys with PMs until they give you their secrets :).