Since a long time, you can automatically generate compressed and/or downscaled textures versions using our build tool.
This process is now smarter. Instead of detecting which files to update looking at file modifications times, it now looks at file contents (using fast MD5 checksums), and automatically creates/updates a castle_engine_auto_generated.xml file. The castle_engine_auto_generated.xml is automatically created and maintained in your data/ directory when you call castle-engine auto-generate-textures.
We plan to extend this feature even more, to store more information inside the automatically-maintained castle_engine_auto_generated.xml. In the future, this file can be used to:
- Track the size of the texture. This allows to avoid trying to load non-square compressed texture on iOS, which is not possible — thanks to weird Apple limitations. Currently we just avoid using any auto-generated compressed textures on iOS.
- Track the DXT* version generated, for the case when we automatically choose the best DXT* version depending on the image alpha channel. This would complete a currently unfinished-and-undocumented feature of
<format name="DXT_AutoDetect" /> in material_properties.xml.