Anyone tell me how to make a blendable texture? I can make regular ones but not sure what needs to be done in Asset Manager and if anything needs to be done when converting to dds

Use TGA for texture assets like materials, DDS are primarily used for 2D -- there are only 40 total DDS images in CoD4 vs nearly 5,000 TGAs texture assets.

Here is example for a blend:

Interesting... I never knew. All this time I have always used dds. Im curious though... have you ever done a comparison to see if there is any visual difference? Just wondering what the bottom line is with one versus the other.

And thanks for the blend info

Would I be able to use this for decals and it will show?

Like Harry said, is there a difference between dds and tga cause I use dds for most of my textures?

HarryNutz writes...

Sparky knows more about this because he is a pro developer at Treyarch, but I think I am right - it makes no difference whether you use .DDS or .TGA.

From a file format point of view, .DDS is better than .TGA as its compression algorithm is better than .TGA. However, the developers at IW have always favoured .TGA over .DDS for some reason.

In COD2, you could only use .DDS format for 2D images (i.e. hud items). COD2 Asset Manager throws an error message if you try and use .DDS for detail, normal, cosin power or specular maps. However, in the COD4 engine they fixed it so you could use either .DDS or .TGA. It doesn't make any difference to the quality of a texture, so I would offer the theory that there are more .TGA files in COD4 compared with the number of .DDS files only because they fixed it to allow .DDS for types of all maps (i.e. normal, detail, consin, and specular) at a late stage in development of the COD4 engine (as in, it was a late comer to the table). By that time, they had more .TGA files than .DDS files. Considering that there is no difference in using .DDS or .TGA, I can think of no other explanation which makes any sense.

Saving files as .dds will create a set of mip maps, which will reduce flimmering of the material in the engine, try it for yourself and look if you see the difference ingame...but sometimes the .dds compression gives you really ugly artifacts, especially with textures going towards black, in this case it would be better to use .tga for the diffuse. Afaik the compiler creates a dx compressed image of the sources you feed him anyway, so in the end it doesn't really matter, except for the mip maps and the quality in certain cases. That being said, it is from my experiences for the COD4 engine; other incarnations of the engine might handle this differently.