Resources/Texture
Textures are 2D textures used in all Hedgehog Engine games for a variety of purposes, such as texturing Models and SWIF UI elements.
Textures use the DirectDraw Surface (DDS) format, developed by Microsoft for use in DirectX.
DDS allows games to load textures more efficiently compared to other formats, and importantly, it supports mipmaps which are smaller versions of the same texture which can improve performance when rendering the textures at a long distance.
Hedgehog Engine games use a wide variety of DDS compression types. The standard compression most often used is BC7_UNORM, which is versatile in that it can support 8-bit RGBA colour (though bit depth can go higher), and it does not compromise on file size.
| Compression | Uses |
|---|---|
| BC1_UNORM | Heightmap Textures, Heightmap Normal Maps |
| BC4_UNORM | Scale Density Maps, Material Heightmaps |
| BC5_UNORM | Normal Maps |
| BC6H_SF16 | Skycubes |
| BC6H_UF16 | Image-Based Lighting Cubemaps |
| BC7_UNORM | Albedo/Diffuse Textures, PRM Maps, UI Elements |
| R8_UNORM | Splatmaps, Scale Area Maps |
| R16_UNORM | Heightmap Tiles |
| R8G8B8A8_UNORM | Light Probes |
| B8G8R8A8_UNORM | RGB Tables |
| R16G16B16A16_FLOAT | Light Probes |
DDS files can be converted to different compressions or between other formats such as PNG using DirectXTex tools like texconv and texassemble. To determine encoding and other information about a given DDS file, texdiag can also be used.