Problem with own color maps

Bug Reports
#1

Hello,
I’ve found a German tutorial at http://www.terrain-masters.de which describes how it is possible to work with own color maps.
I’ve followed the steps of this tutorial (open the file colors.tga with your grafic application, resize this file, apply the name of the new color map to the file colors.txt).
Now I have a problem:
When I start World Machine a message box shows the following error message: invalid filetype
After I click on ok another error message appears: Could not load color table (file: color.tga)
After I click on ok World Machine crashes.

I have used Paint Shop Pro 8 to edit the file colors.tga.
Do I have to set some more options when I save the file?

The color.tga file has a width of 256 pixel and a height of 11 pixel (I have added one new line).
It was saved as 24bpp with 16 Million colors.

Please help.

#2

I’ve just recognized that there is another posting describing the same problem.
But there was no solution given.

So any help is appreciately welcome.

#3

Does it only do this when you’re using your modified colors.txt and colors.tga file?

#4

Yes.
I have replaced the colors.tga and color.txt with an backup and World Machine starts fine.
When I try to use my modified colors.tga and colors.txt World Machine crashes.

Any ideas?

#5

Hmmm, I think I’ve found the problem.
It seems that Paint Shop Pro has problems to save the tga file correctly. I’ve opened the tga file with Irfan View and made a batch conversion (saved the file again as tga file).
Now it works.

Maybe somebody can confirm my suggestion.

#6

I tried to save the unmodified colors.tga with PSP, and had the same problem… So you may be right about PSP.

#7

yeah, same think will happen if you try loading a PSP-generated TGA in File Input. It’s a limitation on the variety of TGAs that WM can read.

#8

Hmmm, is this a bug in Paint Shop Pro then or is it something relating to World Machine?

#9

I think it has to do with the variety of legal sub-formats that you can write in a TGA. It can be compressed or not, for instance, like TIFF. If WM doesn’t know how to uncompress it… puff… :slight_smile:

#10

Fil, I’ve tested the six possible combinations : 8bits, 16bits, 24bits, uncompressed and compressed. None works…

#11

Interlaced, maybe? PSP seems to write it in a way WM can’t read it… oh well if irfanview doesn’t loose any detail in the conversion, it is the workarround to take…

If I remeber well the difference was in the 3rd byte. Taking a peek at the TGA format specification, I am seeing WM might not read some mapped RGB, or Run-length encoded stuff… It’s probably not the case of number of bits or compressed/uncompressed…
colors.tga is originally a “type 2” data image, as is the defaul output of photoshop, this means it is an unmapped RGB image. If someone peeks at the 3rd byte in the file, he should see a diferent number. This spec only mentions types 1, 2, 9, 10…

#12

Okay I see that there is no difference if I saved the file with PSP compressed or uncompressed.
It won’t work.

There is another fact that came in my mind. Could it be that there is a problem with the handling of alphachannels?
Does the file colors.tga contains alphachannels?
Maybe they get lost if the file is saved with PSP.

#13

I am not sure but maybe this could be useful:
http://www.3dspots.de/cool_stuff/tga2.zip

Meanwhile I found out that TGA is a very difficult topic.

#14

Yes. WM currently only accepts type-2 TGA files. This is the normal format for uncompressed RGB.

#15