hi martin,

thank you for the quick reply, i appreciate it. from my own testing i found that the latest nvidia plugin produced much less artifacts on compression for nightmaps, where there is a high level of contrast and "gradients" as colors transition from light to dark in certain areas of the texture. for daymaps, the plugin and dxtbmp still produce very similar results.

in any case, thank you for pointing out your ddstobmp converter; i tried it out and it works great. i apologize for not noticing it on your program list before posting this query! thanks again for making such valuable tools for the fs design community.