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I'm quoting Avenger from the BGEE thread:

 

...

 

Ungzipped, you will find a pvr/3 file which has a header of 0x34 long, the rest is a bunch of dxt1 compressed pixels (though pvr files could have a hell of a number of pixel formats).

See this: http://www.imgtec.co...11.External.pdf

 

I have found that some pvrz files in BG2:EE have DXT5-compressed pixels. Anyone supporting PVRZ generally should be prepared to implement both DXT1 and DXT5. You can find algorithms to do so on Wikipedia (DXT1; DXT5). I can only anecdotally say that MOSxxxxx use DTX5 based on the 12 or so test files that I am currently using, but cannot yet say with a lot of certainty what the pattern of files that use DXT5 are, but I'll look into that once I have PVR decoding/displaying properly. I would hazard a guess that the MOSxxxxx images which might have some reason to include an alpha channel would be DXT5 (BAM icons, for example) but that is only a guess. I've not looked into BG:EE yet, either, but it could also share that compression.

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That's right. A couple of PVRZ files, mostly referenced by BAM v2 files, are using DXT5 compression. BG:EE (since v1.2) also supports DXT5-compressed PVRZ files.

 

As a side note, DXT3 is not (yet?) supported by BG(2)EE, even though the compression format is very similar to DXT5. The game will crash if you try to use it.

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Speaking to the PVRZ format itself, I'll reiterate what Avenger pointed out to consolidate information.

 

In a PVRZ file, as Avenger pointed out here, the first 4 bytes (DWORD) indicate the uncompressed data size. There is no header indicating the type or version.

 

The remainder of the data is the ZLib-compressed pvr file (for .NET people, there is a difference between Deflate and ZLib, so specifying is helpful). If you go to imgtec, there are apparently utilities that can read pvr files and Photoshop plugins for them.

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Just as an overview for DXT compression, it's worth mentioning that DXT1 and DXT5 are 16-bit color compression algorithms, so standard 32 bit colors are converted into 16-bit color, then split into 4x4 squares and lossily compressed according the the specified algorithm.

 

It makes me chuckle a bit how the 32-bit color renders that were preserved immediately get axed down to 16-bit color.

 

 

A final note on the DXT1 and DXT5 compression algorithms:

If you follow the Wikipedia article's algorithm, Read the colors as unsigned 2-byte shorts. These values indicate whether color0 > color1 or color0 ≤ color1. Then, in order to produce colors matching those intended, prior to division and multiplication, the 16-bit colors need to be expanded into 24- or 32-bit color, and each channel must separately be divided by the appropriate amount and multiplied; I have gotten output that slightly differs from BG:EE output, so I'm not sure 100% how the division and multiplication are executed, but this is a very close approximation:

 

Let us assume that color0 is 18884 and color1 is 0:

 

So for an R5G6B6 color0, { 9, 14, 4 }, this expands the 5-6-5 bit color into 8-8-8 bit color: { 74, 56, 33 }. Assume color1 would be { 0, 0, 0 } and expands to the same.

 

In this case of color0 > color1, the yielded color2 would be { ( ( (74/3 => 24) * 2 => 48) + (0/3 => 0) => 48, ( ( (56/3 => 18) * 2 => 36) + (0/3 => 0) => 36, ( ( (33/3 => 11) * 2 => 22) + (0/3 => 0) => 22 ) }, that is { 48, 36, 22 }.

 

Similarly, color3 would be { ( (74/3 => 24) + ( (0/3 => 0) * 2 => 0 ) => 24, ( (56/3 => 18) + ( (0/3 => 0) * 2 => 0 ) => 18, ( (33/3 => 11) + ( (0/3 => 0) * 2 => 0 ) => 11) }, that is { 24, 18, 11 }.

 

If anyone has conflicting experience with this algorithm, please speak up.

Edited by Bardez
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Quoting the IESDP concerning PVRZ files:

Quote

Width and height of textures are usually a power of 2, up to a maximum of 1024 pixels.

First, I think this wording is somewhat confusing.  When I first read this sentence, I interpreted it as "each PVRZ page is limited to a total of 1024 pixels".  Maybe the following would be a bit more clear?

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Width and height of textures are usually a power of 2, up to a maximum of 1024 pixels in each dimension.

Second, looking at the PVR(Z) and IE file formats, I see no reason why textures are limited to 1024x1024 px.  The PVR format doesn't even have a field specifying the filesize, which leads me to believe the theoretical maximum texture dimensions should be the largest DWORDxDWORD (width and height of over 4 billion pixels each).  Is it the engine that limits the dimension, or is there something else I'm missing?

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