Shipping textures as PNGs is suboptimal

Someone on this forum might be one of the lucky 10,000. They also made their own texture conversion tool, which might save someone some time and effort.

Of course, they might have written the blog post with the intention of drawing attention to themselves and being noticed. These days, I can't bring myself to be upset about that sort of thing - if the content is good, better self-promotion than AI slop or hyping up the next hot investment vehicle.

People do ship games on frameworks, rather than on engines. That could be considered building your own engine although I'm not sure if that's what you meant by the phrase.

Ktx2 can also be used on the web, and a lot of web developers who make games are using libraries like Three.js instead of engines like Unity (which can technically build to WebGL but does an awful job of it).

> If you’re building your own engine you probably already know what texture compression is

Yes, because they learnt it somewhere, for example, this article.

I don't get the negativity. Unless you work on bleeding edge R&D, every technique you know has been documented somewhere by someone else. So only the bleeding edge R&D people should write tech blogs?

Anecdotally, even I had known what texture compression is, this article still taught me something: the existence of Tacant View. It looks like quite a neat app.

I keep saying this whenever I see books about quantum electrodynamics. Everyone in the room who does QCD already knows QCD and doesn't need to discover it from scratch, so why do we need to write about it? Such wasted energy, we could all be writing comments on HN instead!

Thank you for mentioning this. You often see comments like the OC that are dismissive of articles and seem to think people doing one thing know everything about that thing. I guess when people get to a certain level themselves, they forget that others have to learn things too and don't implicitly know all of the things that you know. I really do appreciate seeing your comment gently reminding people that learning is a thing that has to happen and should be encouraged.

Hey is Carmack’s megatexture madness still a thing un the industry? I think he jumped the shark when he came up w those

I don't think any current games use megatextures-- it takes too much memory, and you can compose tiling textures at runtime for good results, that additionally supports dynamic modifications.

Clearly it wasn't handled by the games which inspired this post. Posts like this don't come out of nowhere.

> Who is this for?

Mostly web games I'd think, it's not uncommon to ship with png or jpg textures for small download size (but then you pay with in-memory size and texture sampling bandwidth - thus Basis Universal).

We used to learn all this stuff by word of mouth back in the day, and it's been interesting watching young developers "rediscover" these things on YouTube, etc. Its great because now these techniques are part of public discourse rather than known only by a few.

There is an XKCD for this https://xkcd.com/2501/ , and I have yet to find a subject it isn't true for.