trouble saving as targa

[Lyle Walsh]

I am using gimp to try to make animated transparent textures for the game
Unreal Tounament 2004. The tutorials say to save files as targa (.tga) if
you are using alpha channels. Fine, I think I am saving them as .tga as
Gimp tells me that is their extension, but the unreal editor won't
recognize them as .tga and window calls them file type gimp File (xp pro).
saving as .bmp seems to work fine but of course doesn't let you use alpha
channels. Any thoughts?

Also what is RLE conversion (comes up when you export the file for saving as
.tga)

Thanks
Lyle

[sime]

Never heard of targa before now, but... Are you using Linux ? If so run
the `file` command on the saved file to confirm that it is saving as a
targa file. Otherwise I would try searching for "unreal gimp" or similar
keywords.

-sime

[Joal Heagney]

Not sure what's happening with your exports. As for RLE conversion, RLE
is a very old type of file compression, Run Length Encoding. An
explaination is available here:
http://www.prepressure.com/techno/compressionrle.htm

Joal Heagney

[Lyle Walsh]

> but the unreal editor won't
> recognize them as .tga and window calls them file type gimp File (xp pro).
> saving as .bmp seems to work fine but of course doesn't let you use alpha
> channels. Any thoughts?
>
> Also what is RLE conversion (comes up when you export the file for saving
> as .tga)
>
> Thanks
> Lyle

Well RLE conversion was indeed the problem, so for what its worth, the
unreal game engine (which also drives many other games) doesn't recognize
RLE conversion so for texutures with multiple alpha levels, the textures
should be saved as .tga files without RLE conversion. This TARGA file
format is a space hog but the textures can be compressed once they are
imported into the editor to DX-5 that allow 16 alpha levels. Most files can
be imported as textures using .png which supports 4 alpha levels in the
editor.
Lyle