Provide the ability to load DDS files.

[Gavin-Williams]

I want to be able to load DDS files so that I can use the format in my applications. It's a great texture format for a number of reasons. It's currently very difficult to use DDS. I can't even view them in Windows. There is the DirectX toolkit, but it's in C++. I wrote a loader a few years ago for DDS, but it was far from fully featured. And I believe it had Dx11 code throughout it. I just couldn't ever write a fully featured DDS loader today (possibly with Dx12 code in it). It would take me so long to interpret the code and get it to work properly. You just can't expect every person to have to write that amount of code, interpreting from C++. It's not possible for most people. And so, in practice, we are stuck using png because it's the easiest format that supports an alpha channel.

But when considering any app that uses a lot of graphics. DDS is one of the best formats to consider because of its range of compressed formats, and other utilitarian formats. The ideal workflow seems to be to pre-process image and texture data in dds before loading. It's the only compressed format that can be uploaded to the GPU and understood - in the DirectX workflow.

As far as I know, the way to test if Windows supports a DDS format is to open a folder with DDS files in it. Because if you had the API it would be used by Explorer. When I do that, I just see placeholder icons. So, no support.

We need to be able to load DDS and extract pixel and metadata to pass to our own code, that might be Dx12 or other. Please, make it easy for us to use your texture format.

And just to be clear, C#.

[castorix]

There are some libraries from GitHub, like https://github.com/john-h-k/DDSTextureLoader.NET
(not tested)

[Gavin-Williams]

Thank you castorix, I've noticed your help, providing workarounds and solutions with regards to graphics work in various posts. I appreciate it. I reckon foundational types should be fully supported by MS, but the links and advice you provide is absolutely helpful in many cases.

[DarranRowe]

Some DDS formats are directly supported by WIC.

[castorix]

Some DDS formats are directly supported by WIC.

I had tested on my PC (Windows 10 22H2) and I get WINCODEC_ERR_BADHEADER with CreateDecoderFromFilename on random .DDS files (that I can display with a tool like DDS Viewer (from IdeaMK) or in C++ with DirectXTK from MS)

[DarranRowe]

Yes, WIC doesn't have complete support for all DDS encodings, hence why I stated "Some DDS formats".

The WIC documentation does state the formats that it supports. These correspond to "DXT1", "DXT3" and "DXT5" accoding to the DDS documentation itself.