loading image. Binary confusion

Ok, I'm trying write a simple tga loader. It's going to give openGL the information it needs to load the texture.

I understand that it has a header which verifies the contents (ie that it is a tga file).

The next part of the file is variable.

Then you get the the image file itself, which consists of R, G, B, A values. (are the alpha values there too)?

How do I know where this starts and ends.

Also how can I tell if it's 32bit or 16 bit?


Thanks you for your time and effort,

cs_student

The TGA format is not very complicated, but it's not entirely trivial either. There are links to some of the TGA format specifications on
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truevision_TGA
and another specification here:
http://www.ludorg.net/amnesia/TGA_File_Format_Spec.html

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Mats

There are frameworks like GLFW that load TGA's. If you really want to learn it's inner workings then go off the file spec, if you want to know all you need to to use it, learn about the header and just using a file handler in C++ that will load it for you.