When is BeamNG going to fix the .PNG and. JPG texture issue?

New update came out and I've been waiting for a fix to this and it never came today. There is literally no reason to do it and all it does is break mods. I get that it gives better performance but I would much much rather my frames are slightly lower than all my mods don't work and have texture issues. Can you at least make a feature to have a setting where the game still reads jpg and png files? Even at the cost of frames? Im really sick and tired of missing textures on old mods i know are never going to get the update they so dearly need.

 

I've made a tutorial on how to fix broken textures caused by lack of .png support right here:
https://www.beamng.com/threads/tutorial-how-to-fix-missing-textures-caused-by-the-0-22-update.78454/

If you have trouble feel free to PM me so I can help

 

yeah but thats for each mod, when is Beamng going to fix this, im not doing this for each private mod that kicked the bucket.

 

Yeah I'm agree. It's silly that the game can't run .jpg and .png files anymore

 

https://wiki.beamng.com/Exporting_Textures_-_DDS_Files
Bottom of the wiki says they plan on completely and permanently abandoning support for png and jpg, so "when" is never.

Private mods you say? I can personally fix them all in less than one day if you want me to.

 

You would have to talk to hacc for that. Me myself cannot send you them for you to fix.

 

I am positive that png files do not work, look at LJ's evo for example, its a mod that uses png files and what would you guess, they dont work and are definitely not converted to dds files.

 

LJ didn't especify in the materials file the extension of some of the textures, and when he did, he wrote them as dds rather than png. So the game was looking for TEXTURE.dds when the file was TEXTURE.png. So to fix it you don't even need to follow my tutorial, you can just edit the materials and correct their extension.

 

I'm just going to leave the following here, but all I can say is that Texture Cooker is essentially broken in 0.22 as it no longer baked the .png format into cache for .dds format (LJ74's Evo mod is a good example of a mod using .png textures but specified either .dds or no format in the materials.json files). It would be nice if that can be resolved though since trying to fix these issues on many mods manually can be a hassle.

 

I can understand jpeg not working but png should just work. It’s still a high quality image format

 

oooooooohhhh

 

I do appreciate the clarification. At first, I assumed that the purpose of Texture Cooker was to bake .png textures into cache for .dds if the latter format was specified in the materials.cs/main.materials.json file. After all, since 0.20 introduced this feature as you mentioned earlier, I thought all .png files would be pre-cached going forward. But it seems I have mistaken this for a different issue entirely, so my sincere apologies for the confusion. Nevertheless, your investigation still resonates with my conclusion of being specific with the file format for the .cs/.json file. The game defaulting to .dds when the file format is not specified also supports this theory. The game used to allow exceptions with implementing materials in this matter, but not anymore with 0.22, which was the main topic of this thread (or maybe it was an exploit all this time that was later patched to optimize loading times).

To sum things up, .png files can still be read by the game as long as its file format is properly specified in the .cs/json file. However, they won't be pre-cached in 0.22 as it used to in 0.20 and 0.21 if one were to use .png textures but didn't specify the correct file format in the materials file. Dibraldinho has already provided a fix for the Evo mod in question, which means the "No Texture" issue with certain mods can be fixed in a couple of ways. One is converting all textures into .dds according to Dibraldinho, while the other is to ensure that the file format is listed correctly for all materials in the .cs/.json file. And then you have the new documentation explaining how Texture Cooker works and adapting the .png files for the feature to do its job correctly. Obviously, using .dds is highly encouraged over .png due to the numerous advantages pointed out, similar to how .json is the new standard for implementing materials versus .cs.

That's pretty much all I can say about this issue. The solutions to fix the issue in question are widely available, it's just how one approaches the issue.

 

I understand why JPG files aren't used in the vanilla game, but I don't see any reason for JPGs to be completely unsupported.

 

As far as I know, .jpg is a lossy format. This means every time you save, the file is compressed, resulting in a lower-quality image. Yes, .dds is also a lossy format, but it's more optimized for video games and many GPUs since it utilizes DirectX. This key difference may be why the former format is not advised, and the game recommends the latter instead.

If you want to know more about the benefits of using .dds, you can read the following article for more information. The application of this format applies to many video games, not just BeamNG.

 

I understand the reason for recommendations to not use JPGs, I just don't understand why JPGs can't still be supported for older mods that use them.