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Shipping textures as PNGs is suboptimal

(gamesbymason.com)
148 points ibobev | 2 comments | 06 Sep 25 20:37 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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gmueckl ◴[06 Sep 25 21:53 UTC] No.45153216[source]▶
This advice is only practical if you have proper import tooling that can transparently do this conversion for your engine and preserves import settings per asset. Otherwise, this just adds a ton of fragile manual steps to asset creation.
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reactordev ◴[06 Sep 25 22:04 UTC] No.45153289[source]▶
BS, Blender exports KTX2, your engine supports KTX2, Gimp exports DDS/KTX2, Substance Painter exports DDS/KTX2, three.js has a KTX2 converter.

Using image formats for texture formats is amateur game development. PNG’s are fine for icons or UI or while you’re still trying to figure out what you’re doing. Once you know, you switch to a faster, no translation required, texture formats that load faster, support physical layers, compression, and are already in BGRA format.

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1. socalgal2 ◴[06 Sep 25 22:19 UTC] No.45153409[source]▶
You should always start from source IMO.

> Blender exports KTX2, your engine supports KTX2, Gimp exports DDS/KTX2, Substance Painter exports DDS/KTX2, three.js has a KTX2 converter.

If you're manually doing this conversion from source images to shipping formats your wasting your artist's time, AND, you'll likely lose the source images since people will generally only give you what's needed to build. "Hey, could you tweak building-wall-12.ktx?" "No, It was made in Photoshop and I can't find the file with the 60 layers so no, I can't tweak. Sorry"

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2. reactordev ◴[06 Sep 25 23:18 UTC] No.45153800[source]▶
In this case, the source are TIFF's, pulled from the company texture CDN... I agree you start with high resolution sources but you don't ship lower resolution PNGs unless you're on an indie game or making a browser game.