QtCS2017 Textures in QQ2

Tooling

• IP situation: unclear
• Do we design our tools, or do we just "consume" the output of such tools?
  • Extreme variability in those tools, they were not built for being used by a master tool
  • What do game companies do?
  • Decision -> consume. Launch 3rd party tools

Hardware support

• Should we build a knowledge DB of which formats are _really_ supported by hardware?
  • With APIs?
  • For embedded and desktop: build a small tool to detect the best format for a given platform
  • For desktop: less of a "huge" issue, we can settle for a format which is good enough, but how to ship better formats if the target supports them? Download from network? Same kind of "tool" but with an API

Texture consumption

• QQ2 and Qt3D have already some support, but it's different
  • Move common code to QtGUI
• Should we create another element than Image (CompressedImage)?
• Should we use a custom scheme + custom image provider?

Atlassing

• Build our own tool that does it
• Output: texture pages + metadata
• Should it be the same tool that does compression? Probably not (simpler)

• Perform extra optimizations on top of atlassing: removing transparency, splitting, etc.

Build systems

• How to identify which files need to be atlassed+compressed? And how to be atlassed?
  • Its own file format
• How to identify the compressed format?
  • Get a good guess from the mkspecs
  • COMPRESSED_FORMAT = iphone-6 etc2
• How to ship the products of the compressor/atlassing?
  • QRC
  • Binary format but not bundled in the executable (and deploy)
  • Build by-product for lated deployment (download, etc.)