Your graphics tools and Medieval II; TW and Kingdoms
Just a quick note to let you know that for me, your graphics tools; specifically DXTBMP, ConvImx , Mipedit and TView are very handy tools for this very popular game;
I've been trying my hand at a little texture modding (I still do some FSX minor textures mods for myself, but no CFSx in a while)..
The game uses tga 8 bit alphas, dds DXT1 and DXT5, plus a *.texture format, which basically is a DXT5 with a different header; there is a batch convertor available: texture to dds > dds to texture.
If you ever want to look at the *.texture format; let me know..
http://www.twcenter.net/
Using DXTBMP as a frontend really makes working with numerous textures so much easier; and it always saves in the proper format and alpha. Being able to load a dds/tga file in it directly from the context menu is a huge asset.
I was going to post on the modding forums there and get the word out on some of your excellent utilities.
Just letting you know how much your efforts are still very much appreciated..
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.