Sunlight

DXT is the most used texture format in games and it is what we use most in Swords & Soldiers II and Awesomenauts . DXT is easy to use but provides some weird compression artefacts, so a good understanding of how it works is very useful for both artists and graphics programmers. Since DXT is not supported on iOS I will also shortly discuss the quite similar PVRTC format. This is part 3 in my short series on texture formats for 2D games. Here are part 1 and part 2 . Note that DXT is often also referred to as DDS because DXT textures are usually saved as .DDS files. DXT is also known as S3 Texture Compression . There are several versions of DXT. The most versatile type is DXT5, which stores an alpha channel that can be used for transparency. DXT5 uses only 8 bits per pixel, making it 75% smaller than full 32bit RGBA. If no alpha is needed or only on/off alpha, DXT1 can be used, which is even smaller: 4 bits per pixel, making it 87.5% smaller than RGBA. That's quite a spectacular...

After last week's introduction to texture formats we are going to look at palette textures today. Palette textures are an interesting and underused option for 2D games. Using them is quite a hassle since normal videocards don't support them, but for certain art styles they offer high quality and small texture size. Palette formats are similar to GIF files. The idea is that we have a palette, a list of all the colours in a specific texture. In the actual texture we don't store the colour of each pixel, but rather a reference to the palette. If the texture doesn't have a whole lot of colours we can get away with using only 256 different colours. References to these can be stored in 8 bits per pixel, so this format is 75% smaller than uncompressed RGBA. Palette textures are particularly useful for cartoony styles with flat shading, since those have fewer colours per texture. If your textures have more than 256 colours, you can reduce the number of colours. Depending on th...

When making a large scale 2D game like Swords & Soldiers II or Awesomenauts using the right texture formats can make a big difference for visual quality, video memory, loading times and download size. What format works best varies depending on art style and platform and a good understanding of the options helps a lot in making the right choices. This is a huge topic so I've split it into four posts. Today I'll cover the basics. The other three posts will discuss the more obscure palette textures, DXT and finally a comparison table of all the discussed techniques. This short series will get a bit technical at points but I've tried to make it as readable for artists as possible: knowing how your art will be compressed is important for game artists. While the texture formats available for 2D and 3D games are the same, 2D games have different requirements, so it is interesting to approach this topic from a 2D standpoint. Also, 2D games usually don't have things like n...