[Solved]Spriting issue; how do I make transparent backgrounds?

[Tariff]

Hiya folks,

I'm playing around with RPG maker 2003, making a little generic fantasy game, however I'm looking to add my own sprites and enemies and such.

I've got battle and overworld sprites done fine, I can just edit over the top of the ones in the game.

But now I'm trying to make a monster sprite; drawn it up, coloured it in, converted it to 256bmp.

However, I cannot get a monster sprite with a transparent background. I assumed I'd be able to copy the same colour from the monster sprites included in the game and the engine would ignore it but I guess not. I was using GIMP to set up the transparent background and Paint to convert to 256bit colour, but transfering to Paint removes the transparency.

Anyone know any fixes for this, I assume it's something pretty simple; I'm not exactly the best with these graphic programmes...

Thanks in advance.

[pacdiggity]

I believe it has to do with the filetype. I think .bmp doesn't work, I can't remember for .png, but I recall .jpg files working fine with transparency.

[Acolyte]

PNG supports transparency. JPG doesn't.

[Tariff]

Ah excellent, that's got it, I'm always messing up my filetypes.

Thanks very much.