Hi, totally new to modding and coding, however have messed around a fair bit with basic moddling/textures (lots of experience with the texturing side) - basic scripting changes for those respective. (plan on a full texture, model and such remake to insert into the engine)
My main question is such - is there a way to change what texture files the IDtech3 engine can use? The Jpeg and tga files are a little annoying to use, and from messing around with jedi academy files I have noticed most have been replaced with PNGs, whilst taking up more disc space have a higher quality and are retentive of that quality, also replacing the tga files because pngs allow transparency.
So, is this a possibility? or is it just a tiresome matter of going through the texture scripts and changing the .tga to .png on the lines of the file?
TGA images support transparency and high quality (no compression artifacts). There is no visual difference between using TGA or PNG. PNG is more convenient for development as it displays in Windows explorer and web browsers / content repositories such as Github.
PNG has better compression (deflate method) than TGA. However if the pk3 is a standard compressed zip (deflate method) there may not be much size benefit to using PNG over TGA.
ioquake3 supports PNG images but the official Quake 3 releases do not. So if you want your mod to be compatible with Quake 3 on Steam etc; you’re stuck using TGA and JPEG.
A mod that replaces all the shader files is a bad idea as it may conflict with other mods. It’s also probably not allowed by the Q3 EULA. I would recommend replacing images with the same formats.
It would be possible to use PNG for development with modified shaders and then use a batch script and some program to convert the PNG images to TGA and JPEG where appropriate for releases. Though that diffidently makes things more complicated.
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Thanks for the wrap up and my apologies for my intro level knowledge, but why would the q3 eula disallow a texture overhaul mod?
I meant redistributing modified Quake 3 shader files extracted from the pk3s not replacing the textures.
Ahh ok fair enough. I think I’ve only modified a couple, the rest I’ve done myself - all the ones I’m doing are at 400% the size of the original textures. I’ll go back and switch them out, cheers.