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[Rogue Yun]

I am not extremely familiar with graphics, and I'm less familiar with how dwarf fortress works. But may I ask some questions?

Let us say I had three different saves of an image file (all of the same tileset)...

One saved as an indexed transparent .png. (Has an alpha channel added to it... looks something like this)
One saved as an indexed .png. (These are extremely small files and comes with the game)
And one saved as a .bmp (These are much larger files and also they come with the game).

Is there one that the game reads more easily than the other?
Would adding color to the tiles put an extra load on the game?
Why did the game come with two different versions of the file?
If I added a bunch of pixels of different transparencies would it cause the game any more difficulty in reading it?

Even if the difference is small I would still like to know which format would be best. I am also curious because I am tempted to add transparencies to my tileset... but I am making the tileset for efficiency (lower end computers). And I don't want to be counter productive.

Thanks in advance.

[Deon]

Honestly you would not notice any difference between .png and .bmp because most of the load comes from CPU processing, so small things like graphical elements don't matter at all.

[Meph]

There is no difference in speed when using colors/transparency. But you can do a lot of tricks to get the most out of some tiles.

[Rogue Yun]

Much obliged gentlemen. Much obliged.

[Boltgun]

I remember reading that the graphics are loading into one texture in memory, perhaps a second one for the tileset as is it loaded into the game. So I guess that the files are only read upon loading the save.

[Meph]

Yes, it generates it on worldgen and loads/saves it whenever you save/load a region. I noticed a huge slow down (or increase in time necessary, as you like), when I was testing things with my 64x64 pixel tileset... the generated file gets rather large.