There is a batch converter available but it's kind of balky; I usually just add and remove the string with a hex editor to view/edit/save the *.DDS/*texture.
Strictly hypothetically, how difficult would it be to creat a plugin to add this as a file type, say to TVIEW or DXTBMP, otherwise treating the file as a regular DXT1/5?
CA provided an unpacker tool for their data packs, but nothing else for SDK or tools. Just a few basic 3rd party tools, as far as textures are concerned.
You can imagine how difficult it is to work with these
images when you can't even preview them without converting first to dds..;-)
Re: Re: Re: Your graphics tools and Medieval II; TW and Kingdoms
A lot would depend on whether the added bytes are constant or if they change depending on some feature of the texture (or maybe the use it is to be put to)
The other problem is that .texture as an extension is not unique to this application. Other games have used it (Trainz I think is one) for their own particular formats. This means that a general reader would need some alternative method of identifying the format.
All my programs use my shared graphics library for reading/writing the different formats so any addition would need to work in all situations
What might be easier to implement is a custom viewer for this format....
Re: Re: Re: Re: Your graphics tools and Medieval II; TW and Kingdoms
Actually the reading of these images was easier to incorporate directly into mwgfx.dll
Download the latest version and you should get 4.00.215. This now reads .texture files (or at least it reads the ones I dummied up by adding 48 bytes to some DDS textures) and displays them as DDS ..... (nonstandard)
So with this version installed TView and Show should display them. My Enhanced Thumbnail view will also display them (though you may need to add the extension manually). Even DXTBmp should load them but probably without alpha information.
Actually the reading of these images was easier to incorporate directly into mwgfx.dll
Download the latest version and you should get 4.00.215. This now reads .texture files (or at least it reads the ones I dummied up by adding 48 bytes to some DDS textures) and displays them as DDS ..... (nonstandard)
So with this version installed TView and Show should display them. My Enhanced Thumbnail view will also display them (though you may need to add the extension manually). Even DXTBmp should load them but probably without alpha information.