I am using lightwave 7.5 and am curious as to the texture formats others are using. png, tga, tiff, jpeg? Is this actually implemented by the game engine? Just don't want to texture a lot of models and then find they can not be used by the community (if others cared for them at the proper time).

thank you in advance,

Rice

I'd vote for PNG, as they are fairly small, easily read via QuickTime (or NSImage) and have alpha.

Just my 0b00000010 cents

I use jpeg for any textures that don't require alpha masks or *exact* color values, and png for everything else.

I'd go with PNG; JPEG has the best balance between image size and quality, but the artifacts might be too obvious in some cases, particularly if the person using your models decides to modify the texture (using lossy compression on an image already compressed once in a lossy format is not a good idea). PNG is lossless, so it doesn't have problems with artifacts, and it tends to compress better than TGA or TIFF. If the person using your assets decides that he wants smaller file sizes, he can always recompress the textures himself.

I use QuickTime to load my textures, so any format is acceptable. And I suggest to everybody to do the same, since it is available for Mac and Win, and works with minor code changes.

Mostly, the format should be determined by the type of the texture. If it doesn't need to be pixel-exact, jpeg is the best solution, tga otherwise (as it is simple to load, even without QT or other libs), or some lossless compressed format.

PNG, and use either the SUPER PNG plugin or that PNG utility we have here some place.

I use TGA out of habit. It has lossless compression, an alpha channel, and is pretty simple to load in. PNG is probably better, but I already have TGA code that works great, and I'm far too lazy to write (or find) a PNG loader.

EDIT: Why am I replying to a thread that's been dead for a month?

Bachus Wrote:EDIT: Why am I replying to a thread that's been dead for a month?

Probably because the site was dead for a month too.

Go PNG, at 512x512 or higher. You fellow devs can always resize down if they need to get smaller files.

Well, to be honest (and prove i'm a space spoiled brat with no understanding of thrift) I always use .psd, and if you were giving me textures I'd like PSDs too, it means you can get into it and modify layers, tweak individual bits, etc. lets face it, any texture you make has between 5 and 100 layers with all sorts of effects/components in each, so its nicew to be able to keep the layer and FX structure and tweak it afterwards in my opinion, just my $75...