Curious: Making a splash screen

The front_freelancerlogo.tga and the two startupscreen tga’s all have alpha channels. Didn’t think it would crash without them, but maybe. Use photoshop or something that preserves these channels.

To clarify. The front_freelancerlogo.tga definately uses an alpha channel as the freelancer logo is displayed using it. As mentioned, use a decent gfx program where you can make an alpha channel with that tga file.
Here’s an example from my mod

The startup screen files,

startupscreen_16.bmp
startupscreen_1280_16.bmp
startupscreen.tga
startupscreen_1280.tga

may use an alpha channel although this is news to me as i’ve never included one and it works fine without it. Again, an example from my mod,

TGAs can be saved as 16bpp, 24bpp or 32bpp. Have you tried them all?

Apologies for grave digging this topic. I have done a thorough search of the forums to find more recent topics, but this one relates to my problem best.

I have the exact same problem as stated in the first post, the game crashes as soon as I start it. I have made absolutely sure that the images that I saved were all in the same format, and all had the very same bpp as the original ones. I moved the original images to a temp folder to make sure they are not read. Still it crashes.

I have had this problem before, but in the end we sorted it using another graphical program, which makes you think the problem lies in the way that my program (GIMP) encrypts the file. Can’t remember exactly which program that was, and tbh I would prefer sorting it with GIMP as I use that for anything graphical.

Is there anyone else who uses GIMP, and has successfully changed the splash screens? Or is anyone familiar with the fact that the way GIMP saves them causes issues? And if so, what would be a good free program to do it?

Thanks for any help in advance.

Not having GIMP, I used what I did have. First off, loaded startupscreen_1280.tga into IrfanView, added some text and saved. No crash, but no screen either. IrfanView always seems to save as 24-bit, so perhaps it needs to be 32. Switch to Paint.net, load and save with defaults (auto-detect bpp, RLE). Same. Save as 32-bit (and RLE), crash. Save as 32-bit, no RLE. That got it.

i never played around with the saving options. just loaded the original, loaded the image i wanted to have on its place, ctrl+c, ctrl+v, ctrl+s, all worked fine. i remember though saving the concept image as tga with default photoshop 7.0 parameters didn’t work well (dunno anymore whether caused crash).

http://www.lancersreactor.com/archive/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=44592&hilit=splash+screen

Thanks guys, your replies finally sorted something that kept me busy for quite a long time lol. And as often, it’s something very simple - don’t use RLE compression…

@Gisteron: I’m guessing that your graphical program took the original image settings when you imported it, and saved it the same way.

@Chips: thanks m8, that topic was very helpful as well in regards to the fact that not even all images are really needed for the game.

Cheers guys.