About This File
View and export Odyssey Engine proprietary texture formats.
A lightweight, somewhat quick viewer for textures in TPC format, or the proprietary header DDS format used in Aurora and its descendants.
Also provides a capability to export to TGA, which is useful when you find images that won't convert via any other tool.
The viewer aspect is a bit of an afterthought, as for the longest time this was just where I tested my TPC=>TGA conversion code. However, over time, I found myself wanting a simple viewer that could preview a lot of images at once, so this happened.
The application is cross-platform, available for macOS and Windows.
The app is written in javascript, built on Electron using three.js.
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How do I set it up?
Windows: Download the '-installer' file, unzip the 7z package, run tgaview Setup <version>.exe
Mac: unzip the package, move tpcview.app to /Applications, run it
* This is not a signed application, so you have to do whatever is required to run non-MAS applications on your MacOS version.
The application provides file associations for TPC & DDS files. Hopefully the DDS association will not override any you may already have for non-proprietary DDS files.
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How do I use it?
Viewing
Drag files in. They should show up. The files you drag in fill the window in a list that generally resembles the file input order. They all show at once, so there's a moderate memory requirement around loading many files at once. For example, loading the 5210 TPC files from TSL takes 2.25G memory on my machine, your mileage will vary.
Mouse over images to get info about them in the window's title bar. Click images to toggle scaling the image to fit the window and viewing the information about them in the info panel at the bottom of the window.
Double click the background of the window to clear all loaded images.
Exporting
Use modifier keys while dragging in order to get Export as TGA functionality. A description of the export activity you are requesting shows up in the info panel at the bottom while you are dragging. Export will occur while the file is being loaded. You cannot export already open images without dragging them in again.
Files are exported into same directory as original TPC files being dragged, THEY WILL OVERWRITE EXISTING TGA FILES WITHOUT WARNING.
When a TPC file is exported to TGA, a TXI file will also be generated if the original TPC file contained such information.
When adding alpha blending value to TXI output, only non-1.0 values will be added (as 1.0 is considered default).
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Features
- View TPC format 32bpp, 24bpp, and 8bpp compressed and uncompressed images
- View Aurora proprietary DDS format 32bpp and 24bpp compressed images
- Export to TGA
- Export TXI files containing the texture extension information from TPC files
- Export all detail levels (mipmaps) present in original image file (can help debugging image compressors)
- Add an alpha blending value from the TPC header into exported TXI file outputs, i.e. '# alphablending 0.67'
- File association for TPC and DDS formats with provided file type icons
What's New in Version 1.0.1 See changelog
Released
- Fixed handling of DXT1/5 compressed images whose dimensions do not evenly fall on 4x4 block boundaries.
- DXT compression uses a 4x4 pixel block as its fundamental unit. Images whose dimensions are not divisible by 4 require additional consideration to handle properly. The underlying DXT decoding library I chose made no real effort to handle this case, either by failing or behaving correctly. Instead it would just display inaccurate output (add one extra block per row, creating a diagonal line artifact and the entire image to be skewed). The project now contains a patch to fix the underlying library.
- This never happens w/ vanilla game assets, but with tga2tpc people are now converting whatever sizes (for better and worse).
- Fixed ignoring of non-TPC, non-DDS images dragged onto the app so that it no longer seems to be permanently trying to load if you drag, say, a TGA file.
