TGA Specifications
 

Hi !

First of all, gratz for this site. As a webmaster I know how diffucult is to create and maintain such web communities ;)

My very first post on this forum will be about the TGAs...

I'm working on Photoshop and I can't make any of my tga to work.
I can work with jpeg with some items of the interface but some will need transparency...

Is there a special way to save .tga ?

Thanks for your help :D

PS : Here is an extract of what I've done so far :p

I haven't actually started working with LotRO's interface at all, so take what I say here with a grain of salt.

Most games for which I've done any interface art/run a site and looked at others' work has required that:

a) your .tga file be a power of two (not multiple, power). 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512. The image within the file can be whatever size, but the file itself must be power of two;

b) you also need to remember to save your alpha channel (transparency), so it has to be saved as a 32 bit not a 24 bit. RGB+alpha.

As I said, I don't know that for sure for LotRO, but it has applied for every other game I've seen so far.

What you've got so far looks good. :)

Ok, thanks for the help...

I've tried to save my files as .tga 32 bits and it works... BUT... (there's always one)... I can't select the alpha channel when I save it under Photoshop CS... I'm currently looking for a software that could handle tga's transparencies easilly...

PS is what I use, it (normally) handles alpha channels beautifully. :confused:

Lemme go see if I can't find the (very old) tutorial on EQI about this.

/edit - Try this thread. There are a number of other ones in that forum as well dealing with .tga files for mmorpgs. Some of the are specific to EQ, obviously, but a lot of what is covered in that forum has applied to every other game's graphics (that I've dealt with so far).

Also, if you want (another opportunity) to laugh at my original bumbling around, this thread is quite helpful as well.

Sorry, but all of this was a long time ago now, taking me a while to filter through that forum to find specific posts. We need to get a lot of this relevant information copied over into the Tutorials section on this site as well. :)

(Plug: If you have great info that will really help others out, please do feel free to add it to the Tutorials forum.)

Ok...

I've been helped by one of my collegues... A photoshop geek :rolleyes:

/edit - Thanks for the link, that's exactly how my collegue teached me...

He showed me where was the alpha mask and how to use it...
I will now spend double time to make my textures :/

What I'd like is a software wich saves the RGB+ALPHA from a simple transparent gif... Is it possible ?

In Photoshop 6 and 7 in the box with the "Layers, Channels, Paths" ... the channels tab shows your "rgb, red, green, and blue channels"

Have an existing image up, mask whatever parts of the image you want to show on the screen, go to the channels tab and on the bottom is a little square icon with a circle in the middle of it ... hit that and it creates an alpha channel of whatever wasn't masked.

Then save as a 32 bit TGA and off ya go :)

I'm having somewhat of a problem here as well. I'm using photoshop cs2 and I'm somewhat new at it. 2 of the problems I'm having understanding what I'm doing here is how to "mask" what I've made and how to make an alpha channel. On top of that I'm not sure what is meant by a power of 2. If anyone wouldn't mind spending a bit of time explaining these to my I'd greatly appreciate it.

Deadtech -
I can't answer the PS question, I use GIMP.

Power of 2: this is the "2 raised to the n" stuff I tried real hard to forget after high school. Basically, how many times do you muliplty 2 times itself.
So, 2 to the power of 2 would be 2 x 2; 2 to the power of 3 would be 2 x 2 x 2; 2 to the power of 4 would be 2 x 2 x 2 x 2; etc

Cairenn gives some of the sequence above: 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, etc

Hope that answers the question