Leadwerks Texture Tools
Community Forums/Showcase/Leadwerks Texture Tools
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| Download: http://www.leadwerks.com/ccount/click.php?id=51 These DDS conversion tools are faster than NVidia's nvdxt and ATI's Compressonator tools. Running the program will display a file selection dialog. Dragging an image file onto the executable will silently convert the file. Images can be loaded from BMP, JPG, PNG, TGA, and DDS files, and saved to uncompressed DDS files, DXTC1, DXTC3 or DXTC5 format. Source code is included. Thanks to Mark McVittie for the DDS saver source. |
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| Thanks for sharing. But could youi just remind me what are the advantages of DDS again? |
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| Compressed texture in Video memory :o) |
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| What I've learned in these forums: They need less memory, they gain more speed in loading, but they have poorer quality (due to their compression) |
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| DDS textures can make B3D stuff look much nicer because you can override B3D's default texture mip-mapping - you can specify how many mips to generate when you save the texture which lets you have sharper textures in the distance and at acute viewing angles without having to turn mip-mapping off completely (which makes everything look very pixellated and sparkly). |
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| What are mips? |
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| http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mipmap |
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| The most important advantage is that they lower memory bandwidth. |
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| In SRX I found the most important thing was that they allow good control over the appearance (or more importantly the unwanted distant disappearance) of road markings when viewed from a relatively low angle, but that's a problem specific to a racing game. |
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| Thanks for the link. |
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| Nice work, Leadwerks. You should thank Tom C. for the mipmap support. |
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| Faster loading times, posibillity to get better mipmaps and a lower memory bandwith is nice, but doesn't the card need to uncompress the textures when displaying them? Or is this done as soon as they are uploaded to the graphics card? |
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| Hi, It seems the alpha channel is broken when using DXTC5 compression. |
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| doesn't the card need to uncompress the textures when displaying them The decompression algorithm is performed when a texture lookup occurs, and it doesn't cause any slowdown. It's a very simple compression, not like a zip file or something. I will look at the alpha channel problem. The source is there, so maybe someone else can see what is wrong? |
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| Regarding the alpha channel: It seems you just need to clear the bank first, apparently the memory is not cleared when a bank is created. |
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| I thought it copied the pixmap alpha channel to the output alpha. The save dds routine is kind of weird because it was written for BB which does not support alpha channels. |
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