Welp, I see a pattern emerging
Whenever there's a mess with bitmaps, then their compression flag is probably wrong.

Thank you for noticing this, because I have the same problem with HackEd. These textures/materials can also be imported via HackEd - and in its current version, I get the same garbled mess ingame.

These bitmaps should not be compressed bitmaps, their type needs to be 0x02 (Flat, 8bit) - not 0x04 (Compressed, 8bit). Similar to the bitmap-reader for textures, the corresponding reader in the engine doesn't seem to honor the type flag in the bitmap header.
So, for the tool, the function importbmp() should not try to write a compressed bitmap, but rather a flat storage of pixels.

(The more universal fix would be for the engine to properly consider the bitmap type, though I doubt that this would be added for all cases anytime soon...)

I'll now go through the current cases of HackEd and extend it to set the compress/flat format type where necessary.


on a side-note: should I have received an email by using my handle in a post? Because I stumbled over this only by accident...

The bitmaps themselves don't need change, no.

If you wanted to keep this tool that comes with the package, then it needs changes in the function I mentioned (and recompilation).
If you wanted to use HackEd to import these images, then you'll need to first convert them to .png files (HackEd can only read .gif and .png) and then manually import each of them one by one manually.

I see two separate, viable short-term solutions:
* fix the importer that is part of the package & recompile
* make a manual effort (once) to import all these materials into a new mod with the newest version of HackEd, and provide a .as file, packaged up as a proper mod for the SourcePort

first, lets see whether the notifications work ok - @dertseha, @voodoo47

second, any progress on this?

ok, so I just need to put things together - well that will have to wait a bit. thanks.