GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 168628
Support for Extended Bitmap (*.bmp) and *.dds format missing
Last modified: 2018-05-24 11:27:09 UTC
I can't open *.bmp files that are saved in Microsoft's new Extended Bitmap format. The same is valid for *.dds S3TC texture compression formats. It would be nice to be able to open and edit them in Gimp. It is also expecially usefull because some games and 3d Applications use those formats today to store textures. Some informations about these formats can be found here: http://www.mnwright.btinternet.co.uk/NewBmp/intro.htm http://www.mnwright.btinternet.co.uk/NewBmp/edit.htm http://www.mnwright.btinternet.co.uk/NewBmp/newform.htm http://www.mnwright.btinternet.co.uk/NewBmp/tech.htm
The way this usually works is that someone sits down and writes a plug-in for these formats. If it's finished and there's enough interest and we are asked by the plug-in author to include it, then we will consider to include it in the main source tree.
Here you can get a DDS-Plugin: http://nifelheim.dyndns.org/~cocidius/dds/
For all purposes, the plugin that exists at https://github.com/DarkStarSword/gimp-dds does not cut it. The link provided above seems to be dead now, and probably for a while. The plugin I linked does do DXT5 and DXT1, presumably DXT3 but I do not know of such support, but it definitely does not support DXT4 which I need for a project I am working on. This would also allow GIMPers to work with oddball game textures and possibly become the go-to tool for any form of texture modification. Additionally, for the project, there is an alternate format based on DDS that could be implemented, which is identical apart from a 28 byte prefix. On top of the lack of support, there are a bunch of still-existing bugs in the plugin (noted under the older issues) that have gone completely unresolved thus far, and still exist and are open. There also has been no activity, development wise, in many years on the plugin. In all honesty, I feel like we need a new one, or a fork. If you're looking to poke around at DDS and possibly get to the gritty details of it for research and implementation, I would highly suggest Kaitai Struct for constructing preliminary parsers.
Additionally: Thanks to a tip from the IRC, I found that another repository existed for the same plugin, and had been forked; https://github.com/iaz3/gimp-dds/network The extra fork not present in the other repo contains at least one bugfix, and that is from six months ago and not much beyond that. I do not believe this bugfix even exists in the plugin's master, but then again, I have no idea whose repo the gimp-dds plugin available in Ubuntu's apt sources is built from.
-- GitLab Migration Automatic Message -- This bug has been migrated to GNOME's GitLab instance and has been closed from further activity. You can subscribe and participate further through the new bug through this link to our GitLab instance: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/issues/133.