HEHE I noticed that to.
It works for now.

Is GIMP good, never used it.
Used Paint shop back in the days.

Well Gimps functionality is up to par to 2 generations back of photoshop, it takes some getting used to but its by far the best free image editor there is. It used to be a pain to get it to run on Windows but those day are gone and it works flawlessly. Just the dds is a bit of a problem as nvidia only made a dds plugin for photoshop and like I said the one google made for gimp has a compatability issue with our game when using compression. At least from my testing so far, there are other dds plugins but the sites were down and maybe I just choose the wrong setting.

Ahh, so it seems my problems with the dds were somehow related to me using the template.psd provided with the tutorial, if I just start from scratch it seems to work just fine:
Settings for exporting maps:
Compression: BC1 / DXT1
Format: RGBA8 (You have to select this before choosing the Compression)
Save: Selected layer (This is the reason why you need to combine all visible layers before exporting)
Mipmaps: No mipmaps

On occasion the map can look off after a message that multiple alpha layers have been combined during exporting. Just export the file to *.bmp (lossless fileformat that removes all alpha information on saving) and then just open that and export it again as *.dds.

If I can confirm these finding over time I'll make a post of how to use gimp for the maps as I guess many people might be put off by the barrier of the steep price of photoshop just to make maps for a game, especially when there is a free alternative.

P.s.: If the export is not a map but an icon file then you should choose no compression and use mipmaps.

Ok I proposed some changes in post #20.

Please don't change anything yet, lets discuss it first :-)

Posted some feedback.

Just putting this here so I don't forget ... last icon in the new /images/icons/icon_is142.dds would be good for public tradeskill researchers.