Not sure why no one has tried since I thought it was common knowledge that .png uses the same encoding as the .tga file type but since it is newer it has much better compression resulting in smaller file sizes. I munged the B-Wing with it's standard diffuse maps and the bump map as .png images with results as if I were using .tga but I haven't tried anything with an alpha channel. FYI, my images that I saved as .png resulted in file sizes that were less than 1/3 the .tga image.

If anyone has a model using a transparency map could you possibly try to save it as a .png and see if it works in game? Using this file type could really result in much smaller .lvl files and possibly speed up game performance.

I had actually accidently found out that PNG works too several months, but what I failed to realize was that PNG has better compression than TGA. I really was an idiot, well, more of an idiot a year ago.

minilogoguy18 wrote:If anyone has a model using a transparency map could you possibly try to save it as a .png and see if it works in game? Using this file type could really result in much smaller .lvl files and possibly speed up game performance.

Sure, I can do that. One minute...

Yeah for some retarded reason I never tried it though I figured it would work since it works in Jedi Academy which is much older, I don't see why all games don't use this format.

Transparency works fine. Proof of concept:
Saturn's skyobject is a flat 2D square, with transparency hex edited and with a PNG texture. Works just fine. Although I might want to play with the .options, again, as the way I have my .options set up they don't compress the texture at all, leaving you with the same exact file size at the TGA, even though the PNG is 1/30 the file size(2048x textures for both).
TGA 32MB
PNG 1.2MB

EDIT: Actually I might be wrong about that, I'll keep messing around and see what turns up.

This is completely unfounded speculation on my part, since I haven't done a comparison, but it shouldn't matter what your source filetype is (or how dense it is), since in the munging/compiling process, the textures are converted to the .dds format.

Maveritchell wrote:This is completely unfounded speculation on my part, since I haven't done a comparison, but it shouldn't matter what your source filetype is (or how dense it is), since in the munging/compiling process, the textures are converted to the .dds format.

Yeah, that would explain why the .lvl size was still identical after I changed the texture to PNG. The source file may be smaller, but the end result is still the same. At least that's what it seems to me.

Yeah I totally forgot about that part, still relearning a lot about modding this game after my long absence. Well I guess then it doesn't matter what you use.