Best compression format with GIMP for textures?

[Ghoulz]

Older textures I passed on to new companions developed a good deal of pixels over time of tweaking. Need to redo them.

 

Been using BC2/DXT3 for a while, but is there a better option?

[Andy14]

It doesn't matter whether DXT1 (without alpha), DXT3 (with alpha but without alpha blending) or DXT5 (with alpha and alpha blending).
When you compress the textures, they are (additionally) compressed every time.

Opening this dds with Gimp does not decompress it!
Or in short: with each export / save of a dds with compression, the quality will decrease.

 

So if you still have to work with the textures, then always export as a working texture without compression.
Working texture format: RGB8 (without alpha) and RGB8A (with alpha)

[Ghoulz]

Does the RGB8/RGB8A format matter?

 

Always had format selected as Default.

[Andy14]

RGB8 and RGB8A save DDS without compression and therefore without loss of quality.
If you create or edit textures, you always use this format to save your textures (as source dds).

 

For example, when I edit my skin texture, I use femalebody_source_d.dds.
This is my source / working file.

 

All changes are saved in this file as RGB8 and additionally for the game as femalebody_d.dds with DXT1 compression.

 

This guarantees that the femalebody_d.dds always have the same quality in the game.
Otherwise it would no longer be a skin texture, but a pixel artifact.