.tga Icons

[Footman16]

Is it possible to use the .tga format for icons in Warcraft 3?

It seems to work on my map just fine, so is .blp a requirement for other machines or just in general?

 

[Remixer]

Why would you like to use .tga? I think .tga needs more filesize so it is recommended to use .blp

 

[Footman16]

Well there is that but I was wondering if there were any technical issues with it.

 

[Chaosy]

I am not even sure if its supported..

 

[Footman16]

I checked the Hive rules about it and it mentions nothing so whether it's a point that's never been brought up or a mute point I don't know.

 

[Heinvers]

On this i have to agree. Tried it once and didn't worked. Yep the tga format demands more space( I think that's why Blizz made those blp formats Footman16.

 

[Footman16]

I was trying it out myself on one of my maps and encountered no problems.

 

[Remixer]

Did you use BTN, DISBTN, PAS, DISPAS etc? I mean that it might work with 1 version but the game might not recognize all the icon formats if they use .tga

 

[Footman16]

Yep worked with them all. Which is why I'm asking to see if mine was a unique case. I could attach the icons if you want.

 

[GreeN!X]

Yep. You can use .tga but it would consume far more filesize. blp is the compressed version of tga (Targa image file) but warcraft can still use tga.

 

[Dr Super Good]

blp is the compressed version of tga

No it is not... TGAs can also be compressed. Someone clearly has not done their studying...

0 no image data is present
1 uncompressed color-mapped image
2 uncompressed true-color image
3 uncompressed black-and-white (grayscale) image
9 run-length encoded color-mapped image
10 run-length encoded true-color image
11 run-length encoded black-and-white (grayscale) image

The fact is it does not support JPEG compression which is what most people use. However icons should be colour reduced compression anyway (according to most icon makers) which compresses well due to the zip compression the MPQ archive applies so I am guessing .tga will match or be smaller than .blp in these cases if the game supports reading them (might only support some types).

.blp often stores a lot of unimportant data. It always needs a 256 byte pallet map even if jpeg compression is used (this compresses very well so is not an issue). It also might store the same image at different mip-map sizes (33% increase in storage requirements). Although the mip-maps can be omitted at times but I think I recall the MAC version of WC3 not rebuilding them properly resulting in surface errors.