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I seen many applications (such as warcraft) dump images as TGA. Why?

Oliver Salzburg
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1 Answers1

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TGA or Targa image file format was one of the most ubiquitous and relatively early formats that supported alpha transparency and generally was used by the games industry for sprite data. In addition it also supported RLE (run-length encoding), which is very simple way of compacting repetitive data and can be useful for some sprite data.

The file format specification was fairly linear and also importantly wasn't encumbered by patents, so this format is trusted for its ease of implementation, features and lack of legal issues associated with software patents.

Ruairi Fullam
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