Talk:VTF (Valve Texture Format)

Possibly redirect this to Valve Texture File (needs to be created) instead of leaving this at VTF?

I agree, VTF seems too ambiguous. --Zevensoft

I thought it was Valve Texture Format. I don't see an acronym explanation anywhere. --Andreasen 10:07, 26 Nov 2006 (PST)

I Googled for both "Valve Texture File" and "Valve Texture Format", and checked all of my demos, and it seems that Valve hasn't officially divulged what VTF stands for. I can only say that "Valve Texture Format" outnumbers "Valve Texture File" at 2 to 1, and I guess that's as much of a clue we're going to get. It could be "Very Tricky Fridge" for all we know. --Andreasen 10:07, 28 Aug 2007 (PDT)

From vtf.h in the Source SDK:

struct VTFFileBaseHeader_t
{
	char fileTypeString[4]; // "VTF" Valve texture file
	int version[2]; 		// version[0].version[1]
	int headerSize;
};

So I guess it's Valve Texture File. --Wunderboy 10:39, 28 Aug 2007 (PDT)

Okay. I was about to move it to "Valve texture file", but that page already exists, so we'll have to wait for "Valve texture file" to be removed first. --Andreasen 11:08, 28 Aug 2007 (PDT)

I'm currently asking ts2do about why he moved VTF to Valve texture format and then back again. --Andreasen 11:16, 28 Aug 2007 (PDT)

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VTF is the file extention, Once you get working with the SDK you know what it means. you might want to redirect from Valve Texture File to VTF instead. plus do you really want to move all the info here to the next page? --Gregory Walek

Abbreviated titles simply isn't Wikipedia standard. --Andreasen 11:19, 28 Aug 2007 (PDT)

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With volumetric textures, does this mean we will be able to implement volumetric fog?

Apparently yes. I spoke to Brian Jacobson at Valve and he said thats what its there for although at present no volumetric texture exist. I would assume support for them will come in a future engine update. --Wunderboy 06:06, 8 Oct 2005 (PDT)

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Anybody know where I can find an explanation of what "Nice Filtered" means? --AlphaWolf 23:29, 10 Oct 2005 (PDT)

To quote from an e-mail I recieved from Brian Jacobson @ Valve "NICE filtering is better than simple box-filtering because it preserves high-frequency information: textures mipmapped with it look less blurry than those mipmapped with box filtering. I believe there's a book from Jim Blinn (Dirty Pixels?) that talks about how it works."

I'm not sure if its a post or pre VTF creation filter, but Nem's VTFEdit also has a lot of other filter options which probably surpass NICE filtering in quality. --Wunderboy 07:11, 12 Oct 2005 (PDT)

NICE is the default mipmap resize kernel used by VTEX. It is a 7x7 matrix similar to the Sine Cardinal kernel available in VTFLib. There is no best kernel, which is one of the reasons VTFLib offers so many kernels, but it is a good general purpose kernel that gives sharp results. I've been meaning to add it to VTFLib and get off of NVidia's code. As a side note, flags denoted by Internal to VTEX? are flags I suspect of being used by VTEX and not the engine. An implementation of the NICE filter can be found inside the imageloader.cpp file in the Source SDK.--Nem 18:08, 3 Nov 2005 (PST)

While not being able to contribute to anything that has been stated, I've made a NICE filtering stub at this wiki, quoting you guys. Some images of quality compared to other kernels would be nice. --Andreasen 06:29, 11 Jan 2008 (PST)

Merging Texture with VTF

Texture is a common term in game development circles and modding circles. If I am new to modding for Source and I want to know how textures are implemented, this is the subject I would search for, not VTF. That said, there has to be a separate page for VTF files because that is a term which will be heavily searched for by people who are just starting out, and because it is a valid subject in its own right, distinct from a more general topic like textures. I think that the texture page should be left as a portal page leading to VTF and other Source-specific texture-related pages, texture tutorials, etc. Merging them will simply confuse the general concept of texturing with Valve's specific texture format. It should be possible, for example, to search for tutorials about creating textures in specific image-editing programs (GIMP, PhotoShop, etc.) and then to link these tutorials to pages explaining how to convert them from specific image formats to the VTF. Yithian 14:16, 24 Apr 2008 (PDT)