Using DDS textures in GZDoom

[etbasch]

I'm trying to compile my own custom texture mod for GZDoom v4.1.3, by using Doom AltDHTPv1.3 texture pack as well as some other textures of my choice from other mods. The new textures simply have the same name as the original ones, so when I add them within an archive to my GZDoom autoload list, the old low-res textures simply substituted with the new ones.

However, I have noticed that using these hi-res textures affects my performance, and I start to get lags in the game from time to time. In order to solve this, I'm trying to convert all custom textures from usual PNG format to new DDS format (Direct Draw Surface). They say that this format enables the graphic card to load the texture really fast, almost instantly, although it also slightly reduces the quality of the image.

So I came into a problem: after converting PNG to DDS, the Doom engine no longer sees or recognizes these textures, and vanilla low quality textures are loaded instead. My SLADE editor does not recognize this file format as well. But I know that it IS possible. To make the game see this file format for textures. The other Doom modders have already used it successfully?

Any ideas how exactly it should be achieved?

[dpJudas]

The support for DDS was most likely dropped. At least the vulkan backend doesn't support uploading a full DDS texture as-is.

In any case, DDS is not the solution to hi-res as loading time is only part of the problem there. With high resolution textures also comes problems with textures not all fitting into video memory and graceful fall back to lower resolutions for cards with less memory. In short: GZDoom currently doesn't scale to do hi-res textures. Best advice I can give is to not try.

[Graf Zahl]

There never was any code to upload DDS as-is. I don't know why Randi added support for these, in ZDoom they provided no advantage at all and I never felt like adding dedicated coding for these formata, considering that almost nobody ever used them.

AFAIK the Doomsday-style hires packs never check for this format, they can get used as regular textures, but will never take advantage of the compression.