Umm... some ramdom ramblings:
We keep our textures in .TGA format through editing / development phase - JPG's don't work at all because they decompile / compile everytime you load and edit the texture... soon there would be only messy piece of artifacts left. So while editing everything is uncompressed and lossless.
When we start the app it converts the textures automatically to any format artist wants, usual formats being DXTC [1, 3, 5], uncompressed A8R8B8G8, HDR and cubemaps... plus few strage ones for special purposes.
You cannot compress normal maps because compressing alters the image -> screws the normals in the map [clever, eh?]. We do some special tricks to pack normal maps so that they are smaller but not lossy.
Also some textures are better left unpacked like fine color/mask gradients because they show "banding" very easily if you do that... SkySpheres/boxes are like this usually.
Specular, ambient occlusion and lightmaps (we hardly ever use lightmaps anymore) are usually DXTC packed too.
Final install package has usually DXTCs although these create bigger package. Like I said JPG's are handy for "bikini girl images" but texture artists usually think they are evil and bad. Unless you ABSOLUTELY have to create small install package... and there's also question about JPG licences so like .MP3 it's just best to avoid it like plague.
We keep our textures in .TGA format through editing / development phase - JPG's don't work at all because they decompile / compile everytime you load and edit the texture... soon there would be only messy piece of artifacts left. So while editing everything is uncompressed and lossless.
When we start the app it converts the textures automatically to any format artist wants, usual formats being DXTC [1, 3, 5], uncompressed A8R8B8G8, HDR and cubemaps... plus few strage ones for special purposes.
You cannot compress normal maps because compressing alters the image -> screws the normals in the map [clever, eh?]. We do some special tricks to pack normal maps so that they are smaller but not lossy.
Also some textures are better left unpacked like fine color/mask gradients because they show "banding" very easily if you do that... SkySpheres/boxes are like this usually.
Specular, ambient occlusion and lightmaps (we hardly ever use lightmaps anymore) are usually DXTC packed too.
Final install package has usually DXTCs although these create bigger package. Like I said JPG's are handy for "bikini girl images" but texture artists usually think they are evil and bad. Unless you ABSOLUTELY have to create small install package... and there's also question about JPG licences so like .MP3 it's just best to avoid it like plague.