Surface Formats

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Many people know that images are usually stored in RGB or RGBA format. While this is true, the pixel data can take in a lot of different forms for a lot of reasons, the main 2 being: to reduce the amount resources (compression) or the program requiring more precise calculations (HDR).

This article has a table containing useful information regarding the surface formats used in Telltale Tool games.

Telltale surface formats have their equivalent OpenGL formats for games newer than The Walking Dead. For older ones, they directly use the ones from the original container (XENOS, Xbox 360 for example). If you are unsure in which format to save, stick to RGBA8 or BC formats. The following table has information regarding all Telltale surface formats and their usage.

Softwares such as Paint.NET, GIMP, NVIDIA Texture Tool or DirectX SDK (2010) have labeled their options well enough. The download links are here. Paint.NET or GIMP will be more than enough. More information about different types of textures can be found here.

Telltale Surface Format	Equivalent Format	Notes
RGBA8	R8G8B8A8, Unorm[^1]	Used for diffuse textures. Use this save option if you do not want to lose quality.
ARGB8	R8G8B8A8, Unorm[^1]	Used for diffuse textures. Use this save option if you do not want to lose quality.
BC1[^2]	BC1, Unorm[^1]	Used for diffuse textures without alpha/transparency. Use this save option if you want your texture compressed. Also known as DXT1.
BC2[^2]	BC2, Unorm[^1]	Used for textures with alpha/transparency. Use this save option if you want your texture compressed. Also known as DXT2 (pre-multiplied alpha) or DXT3.
BC3[^2]	BC3, Unorm[^1]	Used for various textures with alpha/transparency. Use this save option if you want your texture compressed. Also known as DXT4 (pre-multiplied alpha) or DXT5.
BC4[^2]	BC4, Unorm	Used for ??? Also known as ATI1. Use this save option if you want your texture compressed.
BC5[^2]	BC5, Unorm	Used for normal maps. Also known as ATI2. Use this save option if you want your texture compressed.
BC6[^2]	BC6H, UF16	Use this save option if you want your texture compressed.
BC7[^2]	BC7, Unorm[^1]	Use this save option if you want your texture compressed.
ARGB16	R16B16G16A16, Unorm	Used for big detailed textures. Only 1 such texture has been found. (Poker Night 2 - ui_endofdemo_items.d3dtx)
RGB565	R5G6B5, Unorm	Used for diffuse textures.
ARGB1555	B5G5R5A1, Unorm	Used for diffuse textures.
ARGB4	R4G4B4A4, Unorm	Used for diffuse textures.
ARGB2101010	B10G10R10A2, Unorm	Blue and red channels needs to be swapped to get to the DXGI format.
R16	R16, Unorm	Equivalent to L16.
RG16	R16G16, Unorm
RGBA16	R16G16B16A16, Unorm
RG8	R8G8, Unorm	Equivalent to L8A8.
R32	R32, Uint
RG32	R32G32, Uint
RGBA32	R32G32B32A32, Uint
R8	R8, Unorm	Equivalent to L8.
RGBA8S	R8G8B8A8, Snorm
A8	A8, Unorm	Used for detail or 1 color textures.
L8	R8, Unorm	Equivalent to R8. Used for old lookup textures.
AL8	R8G8, Unorm	Used for look ups.
L16	R16, Unorm	Use DirectX SDK (2010 version).
RG16S	R16G16, Snorm
RGBA16S	R16G16B16A16, Snorm
R16UI	R16, Uint
RG16UI	R16G16, Uint
R16F	R16, Float
RG16F	R16G16, Float
RGBA16F	R16G16B16A16, Float
R32F	R32, Float
RG32F	R32G32, Float
RGBA32F	R32G32B32A32, Float	Used for light maps. Use NVIDIA Texture Tool or DirectX SDK.
CTX1[^5]	CTX1, Unorm	Xbox 360 only compression.
RGBA1010102F	R10G10B10A2, Float
RGB111110F	R11G11B10, Float
RGB9E5F	R9G9B9E5, Float, Shared Exponent
PVRTC2[^4]	PVRTC 1 4bpp RGB, Unorm
PVRTC4[^4]	PVRTC 1 2bpp RGBA, Unorm
PVRTC2a[^4]	PVRTC 1 2bpp RGBA, Unorm
PVRTC4a[^4]	PVRTC 1 4bpp RGBA, Unorm
ATC_RGB[^4]	ATC RGB, Unorm
ATC_RGB1A[^4]	ATC Explicit Alpha, Unorm
ATC_RGBA[^4]	ATC Interpolated Alpha, Unorm
ETC1_RGB[^4]	ETC1 RGB, Unorm
ETC2_RGB[^4]	ETC2 RGB, Unorm
ETC2_RGB1A[^4]	ETC2 R8G8B8A1, Unorm
ETC2_RGBA[^4]	ETC2 EAC RGBA, Unorm
ETC2_R[^4]	ETC2 EAC R11, Unorm
ETC2_RG[^4]	ETC2 EAC RG11, Unorm
ASTC_RGBA_4x4[^3]	ASTC 4x4, Unorm?
FrontBuffer	B8G8R8X8, Unorm[^1]	Used for rendering only.

[^1]: Supports Linear and sRGB color spaces.

[^2]: BC means Block Compression, which are basically image compression algorithms. They are lossy.

[^3]: Used in Xbox 360 games. (No texture found yet.)

[^4]: Used in iOS games.

[^5]: Used is Android games.

Telltale Surface Gamma	Color Space
Non-existent	Non-sRGB (Linear)
Unknown	Non-sRGB (Linear)
Linear	Non-sRGB (Linear)
sRGB	sRGB

Note

Non-existent means that there is no such field in the relative D3DTX version.

Reading Debug Information

A typical D3DTX debug information will contain a Meta header and a D3DTX header. Other image files will use the DirectXTex metadata information.

The structures, types and fields can be found in the converter source code.