Why are so many of the vanilla .dds images scrambled?

CivWarGamer

Warlord
Joined
Oct 16, 2011
Messages
130
I'm not understanding why so many of the .dds images are completely scrambled.
 
Well, there are alot of things you can do with a dds image besides textures. They can be normal maps, direction maps or really any kind of data that you need inside of a shader.
 
There is a tool available where you can view the .dds files "unscrambled".

I don't know why they did that to .dds files. It doesn't make sense, what where they afraid of?
 
I've been thinking the same thing. Why? I am not sure that scrambling was meant as a "protection" but maybe as a way of FITTING the icons into a standard size used within the game. If you leave the icons alone they end up taking up more space (width-height) with wasted white space. By doing what they do, they reduce image size and image space. That would be my guess. I haven't been able to fully dissect the scramble method but I am getting there. I've been manually stitching the images to see if there is a pattern. I don't see one, so I assume that there is something in the index files (or in the game engine) that tells you the anchor points. Attached is my current attempt.



I've searched the forums but don't really see anything about de-scrambling these images. Any help would be great!
 
Thanks for the quick answer Whoward--you always been such a great help. But in this case it just doesn't work anymore for me. I posted my recent problem in http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?p=13180887#post13180887 .

all I see is:
Start....
Complete!

And nothing happens. I even thought it could have something to do with my windows soft- and hard-linking on my folder structures, so I copied everything to very simple folders:

E:\in
E:\out

With the files BuildingTextures.fpk and UITextures.fpk in the "in" folder. I of course set the Input and Output directories appropriately.

Any thoughts?
 
Top Bottom