Guild of Writers

i've got a texture with an alpha channel that has lights on it. The entire alpha channel is black the only thing that is white is the lights with should overlay the diffuse image they are in. Did that make sense? My question is how can I make blender render both the textures diffuse and its alpha channel correctly. These lights are lights on a space ship. I know this is probably a question better asked in the blender forums, but honestly they annoy me and I have greater faith in the ppl here.

It might be easier to use a png-file. They have an alpha layer, so you can make something in your favourite image editor(maybe not MS Paint....but hopefully you don't use that) with the white dots against a transparent background and use it for both the diffuse and the alpha channel.

I've thought of doing that too, but I just know that I will find out one day that all I had to do was click a couple buttons in blender and the dds textures would have worked. Isn't that always the way of it? Thanks for the help.