My suggestion, if you''re going for lossless, is PCX - 6/10 on the easy scale and moderate compression.

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Anybody able to recommend something to easily view, create, draw, etc, tga''s? Photoshop can do it, but it''s expensive, and plus it takes so long to load, and takes up so much resources.

WinGIMP (for windows obviously ) - YMMV on ease of use & feature set.

don''t forget that TGA is under the Compuserve GIF license (it was originally a varient).

Basically it means that they can attempt to rope you in if you do not pay a license fee like compuserve is trying to get for their GIF licenses.

Don''t forget, it''s the primary reason why PNG was created.

for the compressed files, PNG, JPEG and PCX (with RLE) are the best due to compression, support of more than three channels for the first two, and the fact that none of them require any licensing.

That and PNG is damn easy to handle.

quote:

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Original post by Crispy
Unless you mean using some 3rd party library, you''re joking, right?

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I done it using straight libpng and it was very easy.
Decoding the whole huffman compression emplyed by png is not an easy task. libpng takes in everything you need and lets you "just load" with ease.

I actually think I spent more on TGA loading than PNG loading (and the png infrastructure supports more advanced functionalities).

Take a look at libpng!


DDS is also a very good choice. I also plan to support it with some limitations (no compression). I raccomand to spend a bit on that one, it looks especially pleasing to store normal maps and stuff like that (you can do it with sufficient precision in PNG sometimes however).

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Original post by Krohm
Decoding the whole huffman compression emplyed by png is not an easy task.

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It''s not that difficult. I think my PNG loader took about a week and a half to write.

To the OP: I recommend PNG for images which need to be lossless or look bad in jpeg and JPEG for photographic images. TGA has legal issues, as Dredge-Master posted.

Enigma

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Original post by Jx
If you want non-lossy compression in an easy to use format, try PCX or take a look at the PNG (my personal preference) which provides very good compression for a non-lossy format.

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well tga and pcx use the same type of compression(RLE).
And the data storage looks similar enough.
the only real diference is that tga can have 32 bit colors while pcx(last time i checked atleast) can only have up to 8bit colors.

Png as you suggest i great(personaly i havn''t implemented it in my texture loader at this moment, but i will), it''s only problem is that it needs a lib to work, tga doesn''t, but that''s a minor problem.
Personaly my texture loader will use bmp, tga, jpg, png and posibly one of my own format''s when it''s done.

for image loading there are two libs that i know of, DevIL which is a dll/lib combo (and now out of production iirc) and Corona which is a lib and a header.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/corona/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/openil/

They can both handle pngs and tga