How to Make Decals?

I've searched around this and other forums and found a thread here re: editing decals (e.g. Decal_DH_dash8_100.bmp).

"Opa" Marshall created documentation on editing prop bmps to fix a transparency issue that apparently helped someone with their decal editing.

I followed the instructions but had no luck. The decal shows up as a black rectangle on the plane.

I also found somewhere what someone else had done and followed their method with no luck.

I then tried taking an already existing decal and editing that, doing nothing but changing the text, following the instructions from DXT1 Bitmap Manipulator to a T. No luck.

I cannot figure out why any decal I edit or create is unsuccessful.

Has anyone had success and can point me in the right direction?

Not aware of a "decal" concept … is it a particular type of texture file?

Either way, in my experience "black squares" are usually the result of editing an older style texture, where black was translated as being transparent, and saving it in a different format, thereby losing the native transparency.

Over the years there have been several different "flavours" of texture bmp and you need to ascertain exactly what type of file you're dealing with so you can save it in the same format.

The kind of decal I'm talking about is the lettering you see of a plane's airline.There's one in the texture folders of the 747.

And, yes, black is the transparency for the alpha channel.

As for the type of bmp, I made a small edit to the plane itself and saved it as a DXT3 extended bitmap, which is what I always use for FS9. I've never had a problem using that format. In fact, I think I learned about it in this forum.

Anyway, I saved the decal in the same format and nada. Zilch. Fail.

I'm about a millimeter away from giving up. You're probably my last hope. lol

The good old decal bmp thingy.

Thank you very much, RJ. That's the info I was looking for. Much appreciated.