Are there any advantages using .tga picture files?

[htpcorsica]

Hello Daiwilletti and others, are there any advantages using .tga picture files as opposed to .dds? I noticed you used them in your MAW enhancement upload in the fxtextures folder see below. was just curious thats all !

 

[BorekS]

well, using TGAs is rather disadvantage, because they are uncompressed files, comparing to DDS images. both are there because they can hold the image transparency feature.

on the other side when DDS compression algorythm is used unwisely, the original image becomes a pixelised trash result.

 

[htpcorsica]

Thanks Boreks, if you save in the wrong dds format a non compatible one then you have problems is that what you mean?

 

[Daiwilletti]

Hello Daiwilletti and others, are there any advantages using .tga picture files as opposed to .dds? I noticed you used them in your MAW enhancement upload in the fxtextures folder see below. was just curious thats all !

Good question htpcorsica, not sure if I can do justice to it!

Thanks to BorekS for his information.

The .tga files were used early on in the making of cfs3, methinks. Then the decision was taken to use .dds textures, for the reasons given by BorekS. However, in the stock effects.xml file, and subsequently migrating over to the effects.xml files for other instals and theatres, are some old "artifacts" - effects which refer to .tga textures rather than .dds textures.

I included the .tga textures so that those effects would work. However arguably it would be better to do a find and replace operation (which is quick and easy to do in Notepad) and replace all referrences in the effects.xml to .tga textures, with reference to the identically named .dds textures. Then you would just have to check that all the appropriate .dds textures are in the Effects folder (probably in the fxtextures sub-folder). I think you will see that the .tga files in the MAW package almost all (hopefully all) have a correspondingly named .dds texture already. Hence the find and replace option is probably the best way to go.

But perhaps I thought that it was undesirable to include an edited effects.xml file in my package, because many people have already edited and personalised their effects.xml files (for example by adding the effects lines for nDicki's 109s, or Liquidchicken's ships). Hence the simplest way forward was to include the .tga files, just in case people have effects.xml files with some of the older effects lines.

As people are finding with Ankor's shaders, you start to end up with many different permutations and combinations so simplicity is the best in this case, despite the disadvantages of .tga textures.

HTH,

 

[BorekS]

if you save in the wrong dds format a non compatible one then you have problems is that what you mean?

I rather mean when saving the DDS into current format the image editor usually allows to set some compression method. I personally am happy with Paint.NET DDS plug-in, remembering awfull results from other editors so like one guy who saved my paint templates into DDS files with PhotoShop, giving a utter crap, comparing to the original paint. various methods just giving various results.