.BLP's and .TGA's

[Asuhrie]

I've recently developed an interest in doing some graphical changes to the ingame textures for the various interface screens.

The major problem I've had is that when converting .TGA's to .BLPs, the colors tend to bleed and the resulting image is imperfect. I've ran across a few threads stating that you can use .tga files instead of .BLPs, but anytime I do this, WoW fails to load my .TGA file.

Does anyone know a solution to this? Or maybe a technique I can use to minimize bleeding?

[brotherhobbes]

To get .tga files to show up, they have to be in a certain format. There's an excellent guide over on the WowAce forums about this: http://forums.wowace.com/showthread.php?t=15439

Note that you might need to be registered and logged into the forums there to see the pictures.

edit: If you have a Curse login, you can use it on WowAce for the forums, btw.

[tinyu]

i find that PNG files convert to BLP a lot easier.

[Cairenn]

There are only three things that the targa format requires to work properly in games (and a lot of games these days don't even have the first one any more):

1. The dimensions need to be a power of 2 (2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024);
2. The max dimensions must be 1024x1024. If you try to make either dimension bigger, it won't work; and
3. Your graphic must be saved as 32bit (24 for rgb {8 for each channel - red green blue} and another 8 for the alpha {transparency} channel).

.png format will also work in WoW as well as .blp2 (as you already know). A lot of people tend to prefer .png over .tga because they save 'smaller'.

[Phanx]

Did they add PNG support to the PC version of WoW, or is that still Mac-only?

[Talyrius]

This is the first I've heard of PNG support. I hope it's true. Working with TGA/BLP is such a PITA.