I’ve been playing around with Panda, Photoshop and 3ds Max. I’ve been exporting .egg models with .png textures without any problems. But when I try using a .dds texture, the model shows up in Panda as white (without any texture).
I’m just wondering if Panda has support for .dds textures and if it does, is there something in particular that I need to do when saving the .dds texture from Photoshop (I’m using the Nvidia plugin and I just left all the settings at their defaults).
I’d really like to use .dds textures if possible, because they’re much smaller than .png (my texture in .png format is 100kb, the same texture in .dds format is only 42.8kb).
No, sorry, Panda doesn’t presently support the .dds image format. You can achieve a pretty good file compression with jpeg, though. (This won’t compress the image in texture memory, of course.)
Tiptoe, you can try to use the indexed color mode within Photoshop. It will compressed the textures to any number of colors you can set. It works fine but of course, the uncompressed ones is the best coz their colors are preserved. If you compressed a texture, the color depth will be decreased, e.g from 24 bpp (bit per pixel) into 16 bpp.
Note that in the latest version of Panda, you can specify:
compressed-textures 1
in your Config.prc file. This will cause the equivalent compression to occur at load time (if your graphics card supports this), so that the texture takes up the same amount of space in texture memory that it would take up if you saved it as a .dds file.