question to devs

[zorbawic]

whats the best file format for textures used in maps (NMF) - i mean for best quality and render speed

[Tobi]

For render speed it doesn't matter which format you use, textures are all converted to the same internal format on loading (except possibly formats without alpha and formats with alpha, no clue if alpha textures are supported tho).

Regarding quality I doubt it matters much, but if you're really picky you should use lossless fileformats, e.g. png (and not jpg). But again - as long as your jpeg quality is high enough I seriously doubt anyone would ever notice jpeg compression artifacts on textures.

So I suggest just using jpg, at least for textures without alpha channel.

[KDR_11k]

Does Spring use/support DXT? Wouldn't DDS be the best format in that case?

[Tobi]

I haven't seen that support in the NMF (yet), I could be mistaken tho.

[jcnossen]

DDS is supported IIRC, like with models or any other image (All springs code uses the same image loading lib), but it is a lot larger than png/jpg. So like tobi said, jpg is usually the best choice.

However if you need alpha (Sm3 bumpmaps store specular in alpha channel), you can use PNG I think.

[NOiZE]

PNG can have a alpha channel, jpg cannot

[SJ]

DDS should be the format of choice as long as you can stand the artifacts from it, since it will take up 4x less texture memory.

[Argh]

What SJ said is correct. DDS is optimized for GPUs, and should be used whenever possible.