The .TGA Screenshot Format is broken

Community General Discussion
1

Greetings everyone.

It has come to my attention that screenshots in the .TGA format has been broken for probably a relative long time. What is .TGA? It’s a file format used for screenshots in World of Warcraft since Vanilla that is uncompressed and it is still able to be used in todays’ World of Warcraft. However after looking over all the screenshots I’ve taken in both Classic and Retail I finally noticed something odd.

Essentially I would assume that the format broke after the Cataclysm graphics enhancements as the processing that World of Warcraft does for the .TGA screenshots in Classic and BFA cannot comprehend Skyboxes or the graphics enhancements that Cataclysm provided (Sunrays/Lighting effects).

Now this really sucks as what occurs after the screenshot is saved is that the Skyboxes appear as pitch black transparent even in Classic World of Warcraft. The lighting effects in BFA appear the same way.

Now I didn’t recognize this since the effects for Skyboxes is still visible but the Skybox itself is not so it wasn’t easy to see the issue at hand.

Now, I personally will understand if Blizzard do not want to fix the issue in BFA as it could potentially be a lot of work. Though it would be a shame that the original file format for screenshots in Vanilla WoW is kept not actually functioning as it should be.

Again, I just wanted to raise awareness as some of us really enjoy taking screenshots in World of Warcraft and might like to keep our screenshots in uncompressed formats for photoshop/archiving/format changing and so on and we find JPG inadequate for our needs.

Album Screenshot (Link limitation, sorry!) : https://imgur.com/a/JaNPxCK#pVyeOqc
-BFA-

Skyboxes

  1. .JPG Quality 10
  2. .TGA converted to .PNG

Lighting Effects

  1. .JPG Quality 10
  2. .TGA converted to .PNG

-Classic-

Skyboxes

  1. .JPG Quality 10
  2. .TGA converted to .PNG

I couldn’t find any Lighting issue but if you want to test Classic Lighting tests you may do so by typing:

/console screenshotFormat tga and utilize irfanView or any other image viewer with support for .TGA with ease of access to convert to .PNG. and compare to JPG via:

/console screenshotFormat jpg
/console screenshotQuality 10
(default is 6 for those who want to return back to normal screenshot settings)

I apologize for bringing this up but a gamemaster asked me to instead go to the forums to bring this to everyones attention.

I really hope this at least gets fixed for Classic WoW as it only seems to have the issue with Skyboxes from as far as my bug testing has gone. I haven’t seen any forums report about this issue since 2016 and I was quite surprised to see that.

So I just wanted to bring it to people’s attention especially since some of us really love to look back on memories in World of Warcraft through these screenshots and especially some of us who prefer uncompressed image formats and who are not aware of these issues.

I hope everyone has a great day and a good upcoming weekend, cheers!

3 Likes
2

Is there a reason why your album is flagged as adults only?

Edit: I’ve just done a quick test and can confirm that in my TGA file the skybox portion of the image was converted to a transparent area. Well, this sucks if you’ve been using TGA as your screenshot format of choice.

3

Imgur for the past two weeks have been autoflagging images as 18+ after a set of time after upload for no clear cut reason. Any image seems to get flagged. I don’t know why my World of Warcraft screenshots showcasing the bug would flag it.

4

Sounds almost as good as Youtubes new ‘kids videos rule’ silliness.

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They must consider a gnome in a yeti onesie in a skyless world to be cosmic horror or something. Oh well… Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.

[Album] WoW .TGA Screenshot Bug
2 Likes
6

I can confirm that Classic also has the lighting transparency issue from the Cataclysm enhancements, as well. Essentially making Classic’s original screenshot format completely useless like on BFA. If there’s anyone with dual access to NA who could start a thread on the North American General forums to bring this to the more likely way of getting developers to see this.

I’d be very much happy. I am trying my very best to figure out the best approach to get this to their attention as it seems publically no one has voiced concerns about this issue since 2016 which is 6 years after Cataclysm.

7

I can’t help with the US account, but would you be happy with PNGs?

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I think a migration from TGA (Which is a really old format mind you) to PNG is totally fine response to this issue.

Especially if you can use a hypothetical /console screenshotCompression 0-10 scale as used with GIMP.

I’ve come up with my own solution in the meantime I just think that this issue is problematic due to the fact that I didn’t notice this issue until now and I worry for others screenshot collections.

I’ve taken 100s upon 100s of screenshots and did not recognize the issue. I just feel it either warrants a switch to PNG as the companion format to JPG or TGA being fixed.

If the developers find the TGA fix to be completely time consuming I think a switch to PNG is completely warranted and preferred for both Classic and BFA.

At the end of the day, the issue is about the fact the lossless screenshot format being currently broken and its’ users having their screenshots ruined without knowledge. If the fix is to switch the hypothetical light bulb for something else, I’m all for it.

1 Like
9

Ah, cool. I was going to offer some solutions if you were happy with PNGs but I’m glad to hear that you’ve got a workaround. I’ve been lucky; Windows has been automatically saving my screenshots as PNGs for years so I’ve been unaffected by this change. But it is tempting to start a crusade to get it either fixed or another (non-JPG) solution be put in place. I hate it when things break for no good reason.

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I ended up with a solution utilizing GIMP’s screenshot tool to fix my issue. I get to save it into .TGA format and it works exceptionally well.

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