.PNG support

Any plans for this? .TGA is a pain to work with, and is the only one currently which supports transparency.


Best,
-joshua

I agree that PNG would be a great addition, but out of curiosity, what's the problem with TGA?

Best,
Matt

For one thing, relatively few image editors export in that format. (I know photoshop does, but not everyone uses that bloated monstrosity.)

Also, some editors export a TGA with an alpha channel, while others don't.

I think .PNG is as close as you can get to a standard, and honestly it's just a great format.


Best,
-joshua

I'm using TGA extensively in my other project and The GIMP is my reliable tool of choice when it comes to TGA conversion. It takes getting used to it due to its UI, but it's powerful once you get used to it. At least as far as I can say from a programmers perspective.

Best,
Matt

I was thinking about adding libpng support to SIO2 but I think it would be better to just go all out and use PVR compressed textures in the video cards native format. The way zzajin had originally did it was really nice: he had png's be the source file and what was bound in Blender then from sio2 it picked up the the converted PVT textures.

Let me just say that personally I would like SIO2 to become *less* dependent on Blender, not more :-)

Well, I'm an artist who became a programmer by necessity. I use tools which are made for designers, including specialized vector illustration apps, and hybrid vector/raster apps. You're usually lucky if these export in .TGA.



Best,
-joshua

matt wrote:I'm using TGA extensively in my other project and The GIMP is my reliable tool of choice when it comes to TGA conversion. It takes getting used to it due to its UI, but it's powerful once you get used to it. At least as far as I can say from a programmers perspective.

Best,
Matt

meteors wrote:Let me just say that personally I would like SIO2 to become *less* dependent on Blender, not more :-)

I suppose it's not completely obvious, but that PVR stuff doesn't require blender. The blender script for generating the compressed images just runs Apple's texture tool.

zzajin, the nice thing about the way you integrated it was that it still used blender so you still got the semi WYSIWYG aspect. Of course blender isn't needed at all for it but it was a nice touch.

I am leaning towards something to extend the exporter that would grab any pngs and convert them if necessary and automatically setup the linkage so that at runtime it can just use the PVRs. Unfortunately it will have to wait a bit until I finish up a contract I signed a long time ago that will keep me busy for at least a month.