Texture Formats Information

[Mario & Sonic Guy]

Being a texture hacker, I've studied the various texture formats that are used. Anyway, here's a list of all the texture formats to keep note of.

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I4

Color Format: Grayscale
Memory Usage: 4 bits per pixel
Transparency: No
Semi-Transparency: No
Texture Quality: Low

This texture format only utilizes grayscale colors. Although it can't have transparency, the color black is usually used as a transparent color for this format.
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I8

Color Format: Grayscale
Memory Usage: 8 bits per pixel
Transparency: No
Semi-Transparency: No
Texture Quality: High

Same as I4, except for that the texture is in better quality.
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IA4

Color Format: Grayscale
Memory Usage: 8 bits per pixel
Transparency: Yes
Semi-Transparency: Yes
Texture Quality: Low

Same as I4, except for that it has transparency support. Some textures of this format use transparency as the color black.
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IA8

Color Format: Grayscale
Memory Usage: 16 bits per pixel
Transparency: Yes
Semi-Transparency: Yes
Texture Quality: High

Same as IA4, except for that the texture is in better quality.
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RGB565

Color Format: RGB
Memory Usage: 16 bits per pixel
Transparency: No
Semi-Transparency: No
Texture Quality: Some color loss

Uses multiple colors, but doesn't accept transparency. Better quality than CMPR, but does suffer from some color loss.
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RGB5A3

Color Format: RGB
Memory Usage: 16 bits per pixel
Transparency: Yes
Semi-Transparency: Yes
Texture Quality: Some color loss

Same as RGB565, except of that it has transparency support. It does suffer from a stronger amount of color loss than RGB565, however.
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RGBA8

Color Format: RGB
Memory Usage: 32 bits per pixel
Transparency: Yes
Semi-Transparency: Yes
Texture Quality: High

This texture format doesn't compress textures in any way. As a result, textures appear in perfect quality, along with the inclusion of transparency. However, it uses the most memory among all the texture formats. Therefore, it's rarely used much in most games.
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CMPR

Color Format: RGB
Memory Usage: 4 bits per pixel
Transparency: Yes
Semi-Transparency: No
Texture Quality: Variable

This texture format uses lossy compression on textures to reduce their memory. As a result, this format is used more frequently than the others. The quality of these textures can vary, but this texture format does mess up video game sprites. Unlike other texture formats that have transparency support, this texture format only uses a maximum of "1" transparent color.
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CI4

Memory Usage: 4 bits per pixel
Palettes: IA8, RGB565, RGB5A3
Maximum Colors: 16
Palette Memory Usage: 64 bytes + 32 bytes for every 16 colors added (96 bytes maximum)

This is one of two texture formats that use palettes. These textures are limited to only 16 colors, but at least they're friendly to video game sprites, unlike CMPR.
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CI8

Memory Usage: 8 bits per pixel
Palettes: IA8, RGB565, RGB5A3
Maximum Colors: 256
Palette Memory Usage: 64 bytes + 32 bytes for every 16 colors added (576 bytes maximum)

Same as CI4, except for that these textures can have up to 256 colors in their palettes. The maximum number of colors is always equal to a multiple of 16 whenever the palette is adjusted.
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Regarding a memory usage scale, it's almost always as follows...

1: RGBA8
2-4: IA8, RGB565, RGB5A3
5: CI8
6-7: I8, IA4
8: CI4
9-10: I4, CMPR

Hope that this helps for anyone else who does texture edits.

 

[Razanak7]

Now, I'm in a bit of an odd situation... you see, I'm having some troubles regarding textures. I bring this up here because you must know what you're talking about, otherwise you wouldn't have made this topic. Hopefully you can shed some light on the subject; the main thing being that I really need certain transparencies to work.

Without them, this: http://i322.photobucket.com/albums/nn422/Razanak7/backpreview.jpg

Becomes this: http://i322.photobucket.com/albums/nn422/Razanak7/al_101105_1549binout.jpg

The textures are all CMPR, so I'm completely lost.

 

[Tcll]

I have a few things to bring up reguarding this...

I have your notes from another post you've made...
but since this is the same...
it doesn't tell me how to read the pixel data itself...

my RGB565 format is off by a tad:
a screenshot of my REFT viewer:

and a comparison image:
http://lh3.ggpht.com/_IteXPmeC6ek/TTywCJEuJyI/AAAAAAAACYw/YZi4j9hx1Xk/s720/comparison.png

searching for documentation is a pain because there's like 2% info actually documented on how to read the formats :/

EDIT:
btw,
there's also a CI14X2 format

 

[Mario & Sonic Guy]

Now, I'm in a bit of an odd situation... you see, I'm having some troubles regarding textures. I bring this up here because you must know what you're talking about, otherwise you wouldn't have made this topic. Hopefully you can shed some light on the subject; the main thing being that I really need certain transparencies to work.

Without them, this: http://i322.photobucket.com/albums/nn422/Razanak7/backpreview.jpg

Becomes this: http://i322.photobucket.com/albums/nn422/Razanak7/al_101105_1549binout.jpg

The textures are all CMPR, so I'm completely lost.

Sorry for not replying to your question for so long. Anyway, remember that CMPR only uses "1" transparent color. If there's anything transparent, be sure that you semi-flatten the texture so that nothing is semi-transparent.

EDIT:
btw,
there's also a CI14X2 format

CI14x2 is an unusual texture format, which I've only noticed with TPL files; there are no TEX0 files that I know of, which use that texture format.

From what I know, CI14x2 uses 14 bits per pixel. Also, I've only seen two textures use that format...

Mario Kart Wii: Cayman Islands flag.
Mario Sports Mix: Wario's face icon for the records menu.