does panda support dds textures?
no but should.
Indeed, I’ve been wondering that as well. I really think Panda3D should support dds.
For now, I tried to convert my .dds files to .png files on linux – but failed to find any tool that could handle a job like that. Does anybody have a suggestion?
I’ve been thinking - the reason you guys aren’t just implementing features like this yourselves is that you’re a little nervous about digging into a huge software system like Panda3D. You’re afraid it will take forever just to find your way around. That’s a reasonable concern: it has taken me many years to really learn where everything is, and to learn all the coding conventions.
Even so, it would benefit all of us if you guys were to sort of get familiar with the internals of the engine. That way, you guys could just put in the features you need, especially simple things like this. It would also benefit us, because then we’d have more people working on the engine.
So I am making the following offer. If anybody wants to add a small feature like this, I would be willing to walk you through the process of implementing it. I’ll show you where everything is, I’ll show you all the relevant classes, and I’ll give you general guidelines on how to add in the new feature. I’d even go so far as to use VNC or Remote Desktop so that we could look at an editor together, and work side-by-side on the code. From this point forward, this is a standing offer - it applies to any reasonably small feature.
Josh,
Thanks for your reply. I would be very willing to help making Panda3D a better engine, but what I lack, is the time. As you said, yes, I’d have to dig deep into the source to find out what is where. I’ve already done that partially – while developing PGMM and writing some C++ docs and finding out how some undocumented classes work (e.g. PNMPainter), though I’m not yet 100% home in the source. The last years I’ve been more and more familiar with Panda3D, also with the C++ backside, and I would just LOVE to help developing Panda3D, if you agree, though my current schedule is pushing me around a lot. I’ll see if I could free more time and get more help on my current project so I could also spend more time on other things, such as, helping with Panda3D.
So, I would accept your offer gratefully, just, not yet. I’ll get some time free so it would be in a few weeks (I hope).
You can find my e-mail address here.
PS. I hate timezones differences.
Note that Panda already contains full support for DXTn compressed textures, as well as any arbitrary per-card texture compression modes, including the ARB_texture_compression and EXT_texture_compression_s3tc OpenGL extensions, as well as the corresponding equivalent features in DirectX9.
The only thing it doesn’t do is load these textures in pre-compressed form from Microsoft’s DDS file format. But Panda does have its own texture object format, which can store pre-compressed textures; this is the txo file format.
There are several good reasons to support DDS. One is that there are plugins for programs like Photoshop to allow artists to paint textures in DDS originally, potentially giving them very fine control over the artifacts introduced by compression. Another is that you might have an existing texture that you found on the web somewhere which is already in DDS format.
But for most uses, it makes most sense to store the texture in some standard format like PNG or TIFF, and let Panda compress the texture automatically at load time (to tell Panda to do this, just put “compressed-textures 1” in your Config.prc file). In many ways, this is better than loading DDS textures, since it works even on graphics cards that don’t support DXTn compression.
David
so its better not to use dds. Ok well i always liked PNG my self.
Does anyone have any idea how to convert dds to any other format on linux?
how about google for “gimp dds plugin” -> registry.gimp.org/plugin?id=4816
havent tried it but might work… maybe…