Hello,
does anyone know if GG now supports 'Block Compression' for textures? BC1- BC7 specifically the BCn formats all operate in terms of 4×4 blocks of pixels.

All images are sliced up into these small blocks, and each block is self-contained—the data to decode it is all in one contiguous chunk in memory. Moreover, the size of each compressed block is fixed—either 8 or 16 bytes, depending on which BCn format is being used. This represents a 4:1 or 8:1 compression ratio, if the source image is in 8-bit RGBA format.

This standard layout is designed to make it easy for the GPU to use these formats for rendering. GPUs need to be able to quickly access any part of a texture; they don’t read the entire image sequentially, so streaming compression algorithms and those that have variable compression ratios are poorly suited for this application.

The fixed block size makes it easy to locate the BCn block containing any given pixel, and the self-contained block data means that the GPU can decompress just the part of the image it needs to access.

Moreover, texture samples often exhibit locality in both dimensions—if one pixel from a texture is accessed, it’s likely that other pixels nearby in 2D will be accessed too. The 4×4 block structure supports this well, since it’s convenient to decompress all 16 pixels at once and then store them in the texture cache, where they can be efficiently reused for additional sampling operations.

The first three BCn formats are better known as DXT1, DXT3, and DXT5, respectively, but BCn (for n between 1 and 7) are the more up-to-date names for these formats and I want to make sure the shaders support them before I change my photoshop workflow i.e delete the Nvidia plugins and use the newer Intel plugins.

I have not specifically supported the extra BCx formats, though in upgrading to DirectX 11 and using the appropriate load functions, it may well be supported Best is to try them out and see how far you get. As you say the DXT1 through DXT5 are supported which we use a lot to reduce texture file sizes for GPU friendly decompressing.

Thanks Lee I was interested in either BC6 or BC7 (HDR) here is intel's explanation of it https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-texture-works-plugin

I just didn't want to ruin my current workflow if it does not work, it took me ages to get the Nvidia plugin working with CC2018 I am a bit dubious to uninstall it just to try lol

I hear that I remember having to set up eclipse to compile android apps and boy, I wouldn't fancy doing it over. Although I may have to if I get back into AGK dev. Hopefully its far better now. I'd stick to tried and tested myself, possibly try the new stuff on a different machine or VM, if possible of course.