Question on FLAG images...

[Danny D]

I've been meaning to ask this for a long time, but never got around to it.

The APCD instruction manual says that flag images are supposed to be 32x32 .TGA images with 32 bit alpha channel.

If I use one that has an alpha channel, it is invisible in Links.

In the past I have created my own flags without alpha channels and they work just fine.

Is the instruction manual actually wrong?

Here is what's shown in Art Patscheck manual on page 87.

flag.jpg (98.92 KiB) Viewed 1671 times

[Adelade]

I remember Lez mentioned this, (vid #64 I assume) I think he said he tried it but didnt find any way to get any useful usage out of the "feature". Im pretty sure I remember I tried with textures, they can have an alpha too, but it doesnt "work" either. Seems like an honest mistake by APCD devs to me, or maybe you could argue its simply a matter of Links lacking the update to take advantage of it.

[Danny D]

I remember Lez mentioned this, (vid #64 I assume) I think he said he tried it but didnt find any way to get any useful usage out of the "feature". Im pretty sure I remember I tried with textures, they can have an alpha too, but it doesnt "work" either. Seems like an honest mistake by APCD devs to me, or maybe you could argue its simply a matter of Links lacking the update to take advantage of it.

I'll be the first to admit that I'm not real knowledgeable when it comes to file types and their functions, but with what I have learned so far about "alpha channels", I got the impression they were used to make parts of a graphic invisible. The first question that comes to my mind was "what part of a flag would need to be invisible"? I remember when I noticed this for the first time. I made a white flag with a logo on it. Since I didn't understand what it meant, I made the white part an alpha channel. When I loaded it and looked at it in Links, all that was flying on the stick was the logo... . That's when I first discovered that something was not right. I took out the alpha channel and then it looked normal.