I was doing the WED tutorial from the download page. After making the house, chimney, tool shed etc. there is a sprite area under "Textures - Further Finesses - Part II" section. It says using black bg on "the sign sprite" will make it transparent. However, I'm having varying results with my A7. I believe the tutorial was made based on A5 or A6.

So how to do it on A7? please help. Also while building if i don't uncheck "create meshes" from the default settings while using sprites it crashes on running the level. Is it normal?

yes, very old Tutorial^^
You need:

A *.TGA, *.PCX, *.DDS or *.BMP sprite.

If you want to make it transparent, you will need
black parts of your sprite(tga, pcx, bmp).

pcx and bmp don t know transparency, so you will need
the overlay flag.(the black parts will be invisible)

Tga and DDS do have an alphachannel.

Thanks ^^

But the thing is, I already assumed tga and dds supports alpha-transparency and also tried checking various flags on pcx etc including overlay alone. Following are my test run results.

Original image
Made with photoshop. The black area was made transparent while saving as tga 32bit.

link: http://img215.imageshack.us/img215/3438/originali.jpg

.pcx with black bg (no overlay etc.)

Here instead of the black area, the orange border over the yellow area with text becomes transparent.



.pcx with black bg (overlay)

Here instead of the black area, the orange border over the yellow area with text becomes transparent. Checking overlay didn't help.



.tga 24bit with black bg (no overlay etc.)

Here instead of the black area, the orange border over the yellow area with text becomes transparent.



.tga 24bit with black bg (overlay)

Here instead of the black area, the orange border over the yellow area with text becomes transparent. Checking overlay didn't help.



.tga 32bit with transparent bg (no overlay etc.)

Here the original image shows up with white bg.



.tga 32bit with transparent bg (overlay)

Gets the following result.



So any idea what's wrong? I have 3dgs A7 7.04 version.

Create an Alpha channel by
selecting the background =>
invert the selection =>
Create new Channel ( alpha )
=> Save as TGA with 32Bit.

here´s a version i made for you:
http://daten.rmxpworld.de/Schild.tga
(rightclick => Save as..)

or make the top-left pixel of the image BLACK, then black areas will be transparent.

Transparency in your case is based on the color of the top-left pixel of the image.

I do not recommend to create an alpha channel. You need alpha channel only when you want parts of the image to be partially transparent.

For a sprite, use a PCX with a black part as you did, but do not set d3d_autotransparency. Otherwise you need to set the top-left pixel as Quadraxas said.

If you used d3d_autotransparency=1, try to remove it...

Doh, I missed this part...

when using the method with the upper left pixel as transparent color.. make your font another color than black..

Because later the letters will be transparent too, if you let em black.

Ah ....

you need the "Bright" flag...for transparency..try it^^
i have had the same problem.

umm how can i see if d3d_autotransparency is set or not? ^^'