Authors CurseForge

I'm trying to learn the coding to make databroker blocks starting with a quicklaunch using an icon for an addon I use that doesn't currently have built-in support (and eventually showing a tooltip w/ information pulled from it).

Anyhoo.. is there a program out there (or even a plugin for gimp/photoshop) that will let me open/save or convert to and from blp? I've tried googling and keep hitting dead links. -_-

Can I just use tga? I've seen addons use both, but don't know which to use when.

http://www.atlasmod.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=210

Thank you, I'll take a look at both of those.

funny, i was learning about BLP images all last night and this thread could have helped alot..

anyhoo i found a program on wow interface (just search BLP) .com that did the job but ill try out xnview this week

with this we can make an alternative to buttonfacade yeah? (do addons not in the addons folder such as buttons folders take up memory still?)

Thanks, Storm. Xnview seems like an ACDSEE kind of prog.. should come in handy for more than just this. Looks like it handles *.ico files as well, maybe I can ditch irfanview and just use Xnview for it all. :)

Quote from StormFX

I, personally, recommend Xnview. It has a full-fledged browser with BLP support, so you can click a folder and see thumbnails of all of the BLPs. I use it to export to PNG for editing, because it does an EXCELLENT job at preserving transparency. Then I use Photoshop/GiMP to convert to TGA (There's no reason to convert to BLP).

Edit:


You can use either. BLP is a TGA, just with some different header info, IIRC. As I said above, there's no reason to bother with converting to BLP, as the game supports both.

^^ Ty tons for that. It'll be nice not worrying about conversion for homemade in-game icons.

Edit: Xnview is MUCH better than Irfanview.

Quote from darkeh4321

with this we can make an alternative to buttonfacade yeah?

Not unless you're willing to modify every single icon in-game one by one.

Quote from kegit

Not unless you're willing to modify every single icon in-game one by one.

but i have it working write now, i noticed both neal and syrup included a buttons folder in their interface (before addons) folder

this included quickslot-2 etc and i tried using them in game and they worked. (all be it the applied to everything which isnt always a good thing)

i was trying to look through the dominos LUA for a way to setup caith textures for the buttons instead of GetNormalTexture or something so that i didnt need button facade but this solutions seems pretty nice

now i can make PNG files, turn them into BLP files, rename them appriotely, and customize much more of my ui.

i didnt rly see any wikipedias or much of talk of this before now so im interested in how/when it was started? it seems a much simpler approach then button facade

Well, i have used Xnview for a long time now, but i still don't see a option to convert from .TGA to .BLP ... Just from .BLP to .TGA >_>

Quote from Dajova

Well, i have used Xnview for a long time now, but i still don't see a option to convert from .TGA to .BLP ... Just from .BLP to .TGA >_>

Why would you want to, WoW can handle TGA files.

Quote from Seerah

Why keep bumping a thread that's almost a year old? ;)

Because the information in the thread is still relevant, I suppose.

Quote from Slakah

Why would you want to, WoW can handle TGA files.

If you are using large textures, you may wish to use DXT1, DXT3, or DXT5 format for them, which cannot be encapsulated in the TGA container. These compressed formats require only 1/8 (DXT1) or 1/4 (DXT3 and DXT5) of the video memory as their corresponding 32bpp TGA equivalents.

Additionally, these textures can remain compressed both in the video card's texture cache and shader operations can work on them directly in most video hardware. This results in a substantial savings of bus bandwidth and memory usage. If you're only using a few textures, or are using mostly small textures, the difference won't be as noticeable.

If a texture can be represented with the desired level of fidelity using compression, why take 4 to 8 times more memory and bus bandwidth to do it?

don't the textures get converted internally anyway? i swear my tgas don't look nearly as sharp and clean ingame vs how they look in photoshop.

Your 32bpp TGA files (and indeed even compressed textures) don't look as sharp and clean because they go through at least two (and possibly four or more; it's hard to know without Blizzard telling us exactly) discrete scaling steps before they are splatted onto the UI plane in the rendering process. Your video card may perform a number of different filtering techniques on the texture at each of these steps in the process.

If you are very careful with your UI scale settings and always play in full screen mode (or in windowed mode with resizing disabled), it's possible to get nearly "pixel-perfect" output of your texture, where one pixel in the supplied texture maps almost exactly to one screen pixel of the same red, green, blue, and alpha values.

I say almost exactly, because WoW (and your video card) use limited-precision floating point numbers to express texture, frame, and game window coordinates. Even at WoW's "default" rendering resolution of 1024x768, the height of the game window is slightly less than 768 pixels. In fact, the only "exact" dimension at any resolution is the game window width of 1024.0 pixels at 1024x768. This is particularly vexing because every other resolution has a constant game window height of approximately 768 pixels.

Wow, that really didn't answer your question at all, but it might still be interesting so I'll leave it there.

To answer your actual question: Your 32bpp TGA textures do remain at 32bpp throughout the processing pipeline, unless you force WoW to run at a lower bit depth. (Even at the lower bit depth, they may remain at 32bpp internally until their final output to the rendered scene. My graphics card doesn't support lower bit depths so I can't test this.)

I'm really sorry for reviving this thread and I know that this is REALLY old but I am still yet to find a decent blp to png converter that actually preserves the transparency. Everytime I use xnview to convert the files, it always makes the background black :(

I have tried wowimage BLPPNGBLP, xnview ofc, blp2viewer and still nothing that works properly :(

Does ANYONE know of a decent utility that can be used to convert a BLP properly??

That doesn't seem to be working for the blp files that I want to convert. the quality is really bad!!

It's always worked fine for me. What are you trying to convert, and where did it come from (eg. did you extract it from the Bizzard UI or get it somewhere else)?