How to Make Transparent Textures with Wally

Transparent textures in Half-Life are named something like {<NAME>, where <NAME> is a valid texture name. An example is {BLUE.

Usually one uses the blue colour 0 0 255 in RGB to mark the area that should be transparent, but this is only a convention and not strictly necessary for the texture to be transparent. Since it is not necessary for the transparent part to be blue, blue wont simply be transparent just because you prefix your texture with a {, use render-mode solid, and FX-amount 255 in entity properties. This short tutorial will explain how to work around this technicality.

I assume that you have already made a texture in wally and coloured the part that should be transparent blue (0 0 255), like in the following picture.

Use the "Eye Dropper"-tool to select the transparent colour as your primary colour. Once your primary colour is the one you want to be transparent we should translate its index to 255; to do this goto Colors -> Translate Colors. You will now get the following dialog:

1 is the index of the colour you have selected, and want to turn transparent. 2 should always be 255, because this is the index of the colour that will be transparent (when the texture is prefixed with {, rendered as render-mode solid and fx-amount 255). Remember to tag Swap Indexes (3) before clicking OK. This will make sure that blue will remain blue, but become transparent colour.

You have now successfully reindex the colour you want to be transparent to index 255 as shown in the screen shot below.

The transparency of your texture should now be working