how do you lock your images and such once you've got the final product so that others cannot use them and if you lock them or encrypt or whatever does it effect the qualtiy or size of the image? this sort of a bit off topic but oh well.

the best low-budget way to do this would be to make all your textures be put into a password protected .zip file and have the game open it with the password. Although there are are programs that can use brute force to crack the password. but you might as well say screw it though, only because there are programs out there that can actually pull the textures straight from the video's memory which will bypass any encryption or protection that you have. that is why all games (that i know of) allow you access to the textures freely. however soem games use thier own packaging format (like .wad) that allows the game to access the textures but atleast makes it hard for any other user to get to the textures but its impossible to complete protect your textures from being taken out of your game.

Only problem is that Wotsits's doesn't have any info on DDS and a google search only gave me crap.

Could someone post a link to some info and maybe an image editor that supports such a file format?

do a search for .dds image converter on google. i downloaded a free converter a while back before i got photoshop. if you use photoshop just download the .dds plugin from nvidia. and i'm not sure but i think gimp may support .dds aswell.

I can't be surte, but it's likely the DirectX SDK docs cover the DDS file format, like they do .X. Can anyone check this since I'm at work...

how do you create your own image format?

does anyone know a good program for creating/editing PNG files? I use photoshop 7 but it doesnt support that filetype, and I cant find a good converter either to go from TGA -> PNG...

uhh, photoshop 7 supports .png's...

>how do you create your own image format?

Start with something like the bitmap format and modify it, and then get a good book on image formats like jpeg. If you want to make a really good image format, study up on the way optics works, (translation read up on a lot of physics). My advice is to stick with a standard though.

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Original post by Instruo Though, I suppose that doesn't cover the "size" issue, since they're rather large ;) If you don't need an alpha channel, I'd say PNGs

PNG - Lossless compression, and alpha channel