How to Change ELS Lightbar Colors

(This is a port of the same tutorial I posted a few years back on GPM)

Find and extract the emerglights.png located in the car's .wtd file.

It should look something like this..

Now. There are 2 areas you need to edit here. The bit with the little mini images of the lightbars and the big colorful things.

Those..

Now with the lightbar image bit, you need to find your car's lightbar type. i.e. if its useing the Vector then its obviously the one that looks like the Vector.. so you would edit this one..

But in this case it's not that one but this one...

..as I am editing FORD CROWN VICTORIA / CVPI-V4.6A ELS-H

Now to editing it. It is very important to note that the color is slightly transparent! So you will need a program like GIMP or Photoshop to do this. Paint (to my knowledge) will NOT WORK!

This one's easy as it is just a rectangle..

First make a new transparent layer. Next take your box/select tool and select the entire bar. Make sure you are currently on the new layer.

Then with the fill/bucket tool select 'fill whole selection' and set the opacity level to about 50% and fill that area with the desired color. Then with the pencil or paintbrush tool go over the black separator lines, but with no opacity! These have to be solid. Oh, and be sure the area is still box selected. Should look like this..

Now, switch to the original layer, and clear the boxed contents. Should look..

Do the same thing to the smaller one next to it.

Alright you should be here by now..

Good. Onto this section...

Now these are the textures that the individual 'bulbs' in the lightbar will have when they are off.

In this case this part of editing is very easy because we only have one color on the lightbar. So most are going to be the same color. If we had different colors we would need to figure out what sections of the bar used what. For example I already know where certain thing go for this car. This should be pretty obvious when you 1st open up the original texture. For this car it like this...

5 is for the rear secondary's and i'm not sure what 6 is for.

Anyhow this not so hard for this car. You are just going to make 1,2,3,and 4 orange.

Get yo box select tool and select one of em.

Then will the fill tool, set the opacity to around 50% (this can varies per car and color) and fill that box.

Now for the trick.. with that select tool box still there, right click and go to 'copy visible'.

Then just copy and paste a few time over the others and boom.

Now say you wanted that back secondary light to be green. Use a similar process.

Use the circle select tool (cause its a circle!) and do the same. Bucket fill with a green at about 75% opacity (only cause we are covering red this time so it takes a little more).

Should get something like this...

And that is it for the emerglights file!

Save as a .png with any name.

Next is the emerglights_emis.png

Extract the emerglights_emis.png from the .wtd

Open it up!

Should look something like this..

What this file does is give texture to the individual 'bulbs' when they are on.

Now again this will be easy as our lightbar is all one color. If it were not we'd have to figure out which ones go to which parts of the lightbar. This can be really annoying sometimes. Just remember these were designed with some sense so its not going to be toooo complicated. Oh and those labels are there for a reason.

But we don't have to worry about that!

Because our bar all has the same color we are just going to make all the ones to the right orange.

These..

With your box select tool, select any of those and fill with the bucket tool with an opacity of about 65% (again this will vary depending on the colors, just experiment)..

Now, with the box still selected, right click and go to 'copy visible'.

Then it is just a simple process of copying and pasting that over all of those that i showed we had to make orange.

You can even use a trick to make this go faster. Cover the top row then box select it, copy visible and paste onto the lower two.

Should end up like this...

Now since we concluded that we wanted the back secondary's to be green we have to change the top static, generally the secondary's will be one of the statics. So do the same as before but this time only the one and making it green. I suggest a bucket fill opacity of about 75%.

Oh whoops i missed one.. this one needs to be orange too for some reason.

Generally you don't need to touch that one.

Thats it!

Save it as a .png with any name.

Finally import these over the ones you extracted from the car's .wtd

Lastly to get the els reflections right edit your els.ini. Depending on the car's name go to its section in the els.ini file. For example say it was just the regular police. Find the section for police...

[ POLICE ]



Active = 1

Halogen_Only = 0

Color_Light1L = 0

Color_Light2L = 0

Color_Light3R = 2

Color_Light4R = 0

Color_Light7L = 3

Color_Light8C = 3

Color_Light9R = 3

Offst_SLights = 0

The primary light are Lights 1 to 4. The secondary lights are 7 to 9.



Since we made the primary's orange we'll set the primarys to amber, the closed to orange. Only red, blue, white, amber, and green are supported. They have corresponding numbers as seen in the reference section of the els.ini (located at the bottom).

// REFERENCE

//

// Active Determines whether the ELS can be enabled on that vehicle / 0 for OFF, 1 for ON

// Halogen_Only Determines whether the model is intended for halogen only lighting patterns

// Offst_SLights Y axis offset of secondary environment lights relative to vehicle

//

// Red 0

// Blue 1

// White 2

// Amber 3

// Green 4

So to set the primarys to yellow we change 1-4 to 3 and to make the secondarys green(since we make em green) set 7-9 to 4. Oh and don't forget that this car is a Halogen.



End result show look like this..

[ POLICE ]



Active = 1

Halogen_Only = 1

Color_Light1L = 3

Color_Light2L = 3

Color_Light3R = 3

Color_Light4R = 3

Color_Light7L = 4

Color_Light8C = 4

Color_Light9R = 4

Offst_SLights = 0

DONE. Lets go test it out.

In-game:

Questions? Comments? PM or email me (simplestarwarsfan@gmail.com)