.BLP's and .TGA's
 

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?

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.

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

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'.

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

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

I am not sure, to be honest. I just know that many other games allow .png as well. Some are even supporting .dds now too. The only ones I can confirm for WoW, however, are .tga and .blp. Sorry for the confusion.

As far as I know, the game client recognizes PNG files, but reading them as textures isn't implemented yet.

*nod*

Images and textures are two different things.

Not sure if this helps anybody or not, but I find the biggest problem with working with .tga in WoW comes when you're trying to get the alpha channel to work properly in Photoshop. Because it just doesn't.

There are several guides circulating on the web on how to get it to work, but I've found a simpler solution. Save it as .png. Open it in The Gimp. Save it as .tga from The Gimp. And the alpha channel works perfectly with WoW. Since I started using The Gimp for conversion purposes, I haven't had a single problem with the alpha channel in any .tga file whatsoever.

The format you should use for .tga in WoW - as already stated by others - is 32-bit color with RLE compression. The dimensions must be a power of 2. And somewhere in the back of my head a voice screams you should never use smaller sizes than 16x16. I have some faint memories of WoW client crashes after a patch that caused all textures sized 8x8 to completely bug out the graphics engine.

Don't compress it. That's probably your problem.

I seem to recall similar.

The problem was there both with and without compression using Photoshop, but nonexistent in The Gimp. The Gimp simply handles this better, or at least in a more automatic way for newbies like me.

As far as I know the WoW client has supported RLE compression properly since 2.1. It won't make any real difference though, not on these tiny texture files.

Huh, that's odd. :confused:

you can work with PNG files then just convert them to BLP.

RLE Compression for TGA works perfectly fine for WoW, Cairenn, I have used such images compressed in wow.

The problem is probably Photoshop itself, it tends to embed too much information in the files that it creates. The latest TGA file format has optional header/footer fields that WoW might not like, and WoW could assume those fields are not there or otherwise.

The TGA format can even optionally specify which corner of the image the pixel information starts off in, but for older TGA formats, these are assumed to be the default settings, which Photoshop might not adhere to.

Good info Xinhuan! Thanks for the correction. :)

i use GIMP instead of Photoshop.

I've never understood the whole need to work with TGA files and then convert to BLP for use in an AddOn - any time I use custom images, I just leave them as TGA and WoW happily displays them...

+1
Myself being a total Photoshop/GIMP/etc noob, I'd just convert from PNG to BLP with e.g BLP2PNG (1) (2)

<- was too lazy to try out anything involving TGA files

The saved size of a BLP file is much smaller than a TGA. I cut the size of one of my Masque plug-ins by more than half just by switching to BLPs. It's a good choice if you're worried about the size of the file. Plus, it's the native graphic file for WoW. For me, that's a win-win.

Ah, file size. That makes sense.

*necro*

So i was wondering if blp2png is still the best programm to convert png's into blp?

I recently faced a few problems converting png files where same colors would just be wrong in the blp but i couldnt figure out why :S

Another question would be if its possible to do texture replacements with tga's; i doubt it because i never got it to work :/

I still use BLP2PNG myself. The only thing I can suggest to remedy your issue is to ensure that you saved your .png file as a 32-bit. Sometimes if the program determines it automatically, it decides that 24-bit is what you want. :rolleyes:

As for .tga files... I don't recall if I've tried manual texture replacement with .tga files or not...

To my knowledge, if you replace a texture by overriding it in the Interface folder, it has to be in blp format. Tga files won't be recognised. You can use them for addons though, using SetTexture.

Nonsense. Zip a tga and you will be amazed. They may be big unpacked but who cares.

Photoshop Alpha Layer and WoW is easy. Just make sure to only use just one alpha layer. More are not supported in WoW.

Seconded - WoW will definitely use TGA-format images.

Yes, but I was working with the idea that using BLP's would decrease the addon memory footprint of my plug-ins. Remember, not everyone has more memory available then they will ever need.

Granted, I really have no clue how that all works, but originally my Masque_ClassButtons Masque plug-in (unzipped, on your hard drive) file size was 608 kb with the font options still in the .lua file, and .tga graphics. 580 kb of that is just the graphics. I removed the font options and converted the graphics to BLP's (and added the Monk class graphics and code to the .lua file {not much, I admit, but, still....}) and that dropped the file size to 240 kb, 220 kb of which is the graphics.

That was nice, but, perhaps a better example would be one of my other plug-ins for Minimap Button Frame: MinimapButtonFrame_sClassButtons. For this, I didn't have to remove anything form the .lua file, I only had to add the Monk graphics and the monk class to the .lua file. Originally, 420 kb (400 kb for graphics), changed to 192 kb (172 kb for graphics). All I did was add what I had to to the .lua file and the textures folder, but I converted those textures, all of them, to BLP format.

While I realize that my plug-in's are not huge, by any use of the word, I also felt that every little bit helps. That's why I did what I did. Just trying to do my bit to help everyone out.

I'm pretty sure — though I could be wrong — that a texture occupies roughtly the same amount of memory once it's loaded regardless of what format it's stored in or how compressed it is on the hard disk. You may save disk space by using BLP compression, but you probably won't actually change the amount of memory your addon uses by any significant amount.

OK. Well, like I said, I really have no clue.

Phanx, you might be able to help me with another question I have: Does a plug-in for an addon count for its' own in-game memory footprint, or is it added into the addon it's a plug-in for memory footprint?

BLPs are undoubtedly better - especially if you use a compression/alpha format appropriate for the image you're saving. But, since it appears that UI textures have some degree of hardware acceleration, your first priority to save memory, is by making sure your addon is laid out efficiently.

Frames for instance, are horrible (RAM) memory hogs. If someone is using those when they could just use layers (i.e. Regions), the difference will be far more significant than between what image format they're using.

\o/ Holy necro! *ahm* …sorry, can't resist.

I'm having a weird problem. When converting PNG to BLP with BLP2PNG 1.1, I get random patches of solid colored pixels placed around certain images. Can't seem to get rid of them. Tried converting images back and forth, but the results stay the same. One of such images is attached.

Try http://www.wowinterface.com/download...Converter.html

That one doesn't produce artifacts. But can't be used from command line, it seems.

It converted just fine with BLP2PNG for me...

/edit: the most recent version (from 2008) is 1.2

BLP2PNG does produce artifacts, but is still just fine depending on the type of image you want to convert and what it's being used for. If you're doing a bunch of icons, it should be fine. If you have made some nice buttons with fine gradients and such, they won't turn out well.

If you have Photoshop, I highly recommend the BLP Format Plug-in for Photoshop.

I don't have Photoshop.

Thanks, missed an update. This works better now, even with non-transparent PNG's.