Help making my decal tga transparant, sorry if this is a stupid question.

[MechaStalin 10]

Hey guys ive been flying my first serious campaign upon returning to the game as in the past I mostly just did single missions or used the mission editor. Ive been flying the mercenary campaigns and I wanted to make some decals on my plane for my own little squadron logo just for personal use.

So I took the custom skin I downloaded and began messing with it a little bit and finding out how the decals and ini work. This plane I wanted to replace its squadron logo and some of its custom fictional country logos to show the mercenary logo and my custom decal.

Getting a few changed to insignia was easy but when I swapped my decal in it wasnt transparent and the black background covered large chunks of the plane. I was having trouble getting the transparancy to work or finding an alpha channel setting on the ligntweight image editor I have installed at the morning so I sent it to a friend, he sent me a tga with a transparant background I needed but it doesnt appear ingame that location is just not shown. I tried resaving the image as a tga again which flattened it which made it appear but with all the black.

I tried keeping the image as a png that it started as with transparency and just changed the canvas size to match the decal I was using as an example but it didnt appear either im guessing png isnt supported.

Now before I start downloading new programs and stuff I thought id find out exactly what the game wants, its been years since I messed with textures but im guessing its an alpha channel thing that I remember games back when I was a kid using for transparency? I checked the knowledge base on my break at work here and didnt find anything specific so sorry if this is a double post just wondering how to make my decals background transparent.

 

Thank you!

[+Erik 1,731]

Searching the forum can help you, as a lot of questions have been asked and answered. Here's a post that may be what you're looking for. 

 

[Wrench 9,471]

all decals are tgas; 32 bit, nothing else works

[MechaStalin 10]

Thank you so much! I created a 32bit image in gimp and pasted my tga into it and exported and it works great.

 

I know its not realistic at all and kinda silly but im a big Dragon Quest fan so I wanted to use my favorite monster and demon as a logo for my mercenary squadron. The campaign editor is very cool being able to name your squadron and set their preferred aircraft and skin. Really cool to see the tarmac populated with all these Drakens.

I based it off a skin I downloaded but dont have any intent to release it as its just to test the decal.