Does anybody know how to check what .dds compression options were used to compress a .dds file? I'm using one of the pipboy icons as a hud icon to show whether power armor is equipped (it's just an experiment at the moment). It works, and if I make changes and just save the file the compression scheme doesn't seem to change, but I'd like to know how the file should be formatted so that I can make them from scratch if necessary.

I asked a similar question a short while ago. Fallout uses the BC3 / DXT5 format for it's DDS files.

What Belanos said - but also make sure that you generate Mipmaps when you save so that it can be seen from mid-range out properly.

Luck!

Miax

Thanks! The best I could find in a forum search seemed to be a thread for Oblivion icons.

From the looks of it, mipmaps aren't as important for stuff being displayed on the hud (the range never changes) but still good to know. Any idea if the images have to be square to generate the maps, or just have a height and width evenly divisible by 4 or whatever?

You definitely want the image to be evenly divisible or you'll end up with Tons more mipmaps than you need. If you stick to the 256x256, 512x512, 1024x1024 and 2048x2048 you'll get the right number of mipmaps. As long as the overall canvans of the image is square, what you put in it can be any size/shape.

Cheers!

Thanks. The image I was re-using for my HUD icon was originally 256x256, but I cropped it to 64x96 to make aligning it easier. It would save in the Gimp, and the saved image worked, but if I tried a save-as and picked DXT3, I'd get a "your images dimensions must be divisible by 4 to be compressed" error. I'll keep those dimensions in mind the next time I'm working on a reskin.

No, you don't need any mipmaps for HUD elements. I've done a couple of things with pipboy icons and they work fine without them.