Does anyone know why this texture as well as a sky texture I have (both transparent) have these sort of bands to them? They were exported with gimp and Converted to targa 9 with irfran view I believe...

I followed a certain tutorial on GT. This particular image has a varied alpha layer ( a little rough around the edges) but the sky texture does not.

I'm not entirely sure what your issue is, but if you're talking about the blending of the alpha texture, you could try setting a .tga.option munge parameter to a higher bit setting (-32bit?). If you're talking about the edges having more definition than you want, then that's representative of not making your alpha layer fully transparent as it approaches the edges.

if that doesnt help, try to save the tga directly with gimp, irfanview always had problems with transparency (atleast with the displaying of it)

Apologies for the low quality of the post but i'd bee procrastinating making it so I just threw it out there. Should got a screen of the sky.

But now I can just say its the first thing Mav said, not the second (that's just artistic failing) and that I am intrigued by this munge parametre.

Is there a .req entry needed for .options?

Nope.

Look in your "misc_documentation.doc" for more detail on munge parameters in .option files. I just took a look at it, and it says that -32bit is only valid for the PS2 munge - I don't know if that's hard and fast or if that's just what they used it for. You may also want to experiment with the dither parameters.