Just out of interest: why tga over png ?

Ashaman73

I'm just curious, but why do so many artists seem to prefer TGA over e.g. PNG ?

As coder I understand that TGAs are easy to read, and that therefor many tools support TGA (atleast without RLE). But this was a decade ago, now , with open formats like PNG , which has been adopted by most tools and which natively supports lossless compression, TGA seems obsolete. Still many seem to use uncompressed TGAs.

Is it just out of habit or are there advantages I do not see ?

kodde

Photoshop handles TGA's alpha channel better than PNG would be my answer.

Farfarer

Yeah, Photoshop really struggles with alpha channels in PNG. It don't think it supports 16bit PNG by default either.

Used to be you could completely replace it with SuperPNG plugin but not any more, it had to live along side it.

For a production environment you want something solid and reliable in Photoshop, and their PNG support means it's not the sensible option

Goeddy

also you dont need the lossless compression, your textures will be compressed by your engine anyway and if your sourcetexture has lossless compression or none at all doesn't make a difference.

Farfarer

Lossless compression really helps with file sizes though. A games worth of TGA files is preeeeeetty damned big :P

Ashaman73

Goeddy wrote: »

also you dont need the lossless compression, your textures will be compressed by your engine anyway and if your sourcetexture has lossless compression or none at all doesn't make a difference.

It matters, because different non-lossless compression algorithm add different artifacts to the final image. Using multiple,different non-lossless compression algorithm in your pipeline will increase the number of artifacts unnecessary.

Nevertheless, the unreliable alpha channel handling seems a valid reason.

Thx.