Targetware: 2D Textures

Texture Formats Supported by the TW Engine

Most textures you will create for use in Targetware mods will be in TGA (Targa) format, in 24 bit color. The size of the texture must be a power of 2: 16x16, 32x32, 64x64, 128x128, 256x256, 512x512, 1024x1024, 2048x2048, etc. Note that textures do not have to be square: 128x512 and 64x1024 are both legitimate sizes.

Alpha Layers

The Targetware engine supports the use of alpha layers to add transparency. Most of your textures will not use alpha layers, for a variety of reasons. Perhaps chief among them is that a texture with an alpha layer is much larger than a texture without one. For example, a 512x512 24 bit color TGA without an alpha layer is typically 768k, while the same texture with an alpha layer (32 bit color) would be 1MB in size.

Other Texture formats

You can also use 8 bit (256 color) textures. Note, however, that the game engine treats 8 bit color TGAs as alpha masks. This means that the darker a particular color in the file is, the more solid it will be, but the whiter it is, the more transparent it will make whatever it is applied to. You can use this to your advantage in certain situations.

Other formats supported by the TW engine include PCX and RGB (includes BW, RGBA, and SGI).

Check with the person responsible for setting art standards for your mod before making a final decision on format.

DDS Files and S3TC Compression

You may notice in going through the files for a Targetware mod that there are no TGA files, but there are instead a bunch of files that end in ".dds". These are texture files (TGAs) that have been compressed using S3TC technology, specially designed for use in 3D games. S3TC compression shrinks file size to 1/4 original (32 bit), or 1/6 original size (24 bit). Quality loss is minimal, but present, so do not attempt to convert back from DDS to TGA. The Targetware "Tool" utility will uncompress them, but this is equivalent to converting your photoshop files to JPGs, trashing the PSDs, and then trying to edit the JPGs.

Why use compression at all? Because DDS compression dramatically reduces Video RAM (VRAM) usage, it allows the game to run smoothly on older, less powerful computers. It also reduces the hard drive footprint of the mod. These two factors mean that mod makers can use more, and higher resolution textures than if they were just using raw TGAs. Targetware strongly recommends all mod makers to convert their textures to DDS before distributing their mod to players.

How do you convert your TGAs to DDS files? It's very simple: Using tool, you can convert one file at a time, or an entire directory of files. The latter option is easier and faster for mod makers who are prepping an entire mod pack. Note that the directory conversion option deletes the TGA files after converting them to DDSs. This makes conversion of a mod pack a painless one step process, but you must be careful to only ever operate on a copy of your development files, not the originals. Once converted to DDS, texture files can never go back to TGAs without significant quality loss. To convert an entire folder to DDS files, use this command, where "foldername" is the name of the folder containing the files you want to convert:

tool dir2dds foldername

To convert one TGA to a DDS file:

tool img2dds mytexture.tga

To un-convert an entire folder of DDS files to TGAs (with texture qualty loss):

tool dir2tga foldername