The strange little ^ symbol occers a lot in compiler errors, and doesnt appear
to mean much as far as I can see. Usually it replaces an opening ", I think
it may be a mangled system font at fault.
As for your error, all you code looks OK, so I would say the TGA file is at
fault. TGA files must be either 24bit or 32bit(with alpha) TGA files.
All other bitcounts are not accepted by 3DGS.
{clipped from "File Formats" section of the manual}
TGA true color (24-bit RGB) and true color alpha (32-bit ARGB) images are used for high quality textures. They are internally stored in 16-bit high color or 32-bit true color, depending on the setting of d3d_alphadepth. 32-bit ARGB images contain an alpha channel which gives a transparency value for every single pixel. For creating an alpha channel in Photoshop, open the channels window, and click onto the small "new channel" button below. Now an alpha channel is created, and you can paint onto it. When saving the picture, use the 32 bit TGA format.
