Guide on adding a new model, animation, and creature to HoMMV

Since they might participate in the development and implementation of the 8th installment, and so on.

Let's face it, it's not a given that the 8th installment will even be developed. And given the current conditions that Ubisoft is imposing, it's more realistic to create a high-quality, independent turn-based strategy game. And there don't seem to be any prospects that these conditions will change. But that's a topic for another lengthy discussion, and I think there's even a thread on this forum about it, something like "should we wait for the 8th installment or not?".))

Added 6 minutes later

That's why I have to prepare the images in JPEG in Photoshop and save them as DDS using XnView... As soon as I figure it out, I'll make an icon without a background, and of course, add voiceovers to the animations.

You don't need a transparent background here, but an alpha channel (this is described in psatkha's icon guide), and there's a link to it in my guide in the section about icons. With an alpha channel, you can, for example, save textures in TGA format. Then convert them to DDS. Footman said that this can be done through the editor. You can also use the Noesis program (it's a good program that reads many image, animation, and model formats and can convert them to different formats. Various Python scripts can be connected to the program, expanding the list of readable formats to infinity). There is a script for Noesis that can open models from the 6th installment, although with some glitches.

But ideally, I think you should figure out what's wrong with Photoshop so it doesn't mess things up. There are certain versions that support the DDS plugin; maybe the problem is with that (although the plugin worked normally for me, not only with the supported versions but with all the ones I've tried).

Added 3 minutes later

Paint.net works fine with DDS without plugins, try it.

I strongly advise against getting used to Paint.net. The program is very limited compared to Photoshop. So, it's a serious downgrade.
But, of course, it might be worth using it as an intermediate converter to the desired format. But in my opinion, it's better to "fix" Photoshop