I am in the process of selecting an image format that will be used as the storage format for all in-house textures. The format will be used as a source format from which compressed textures for different platforms and configurations will be generated, and so needs to cover all possible texture types (2D, cube, volymetric, varying number of mip-maps, floating point pixel formats, etc.) and be completely lossless. In addition the format has to be able to keep a bit of metadata.
Currently a custom format is used for this, but a commonly available format will be easier to work with for the artists since its viewable in most image editors.
I have thought of using DDS, but this format does not support metadata as far as I can see.
All suggestions appreciated!
With your requirements you should stay with your selfmade format. I don’t know about any image-format besides DDS that supports volumetric and cube-textures. Unfortunately DDS does not support meta-data.
The closest thing you can find is TIFF. It does not directly support cube-maps or volumetric textures, but it supports any number of sub-images. That way you could re-use the sub-images as slices or cube-sides.
TIFF also has a very good support for custom meta-data. The libtiff image reading/writing library works pretty good. It looks a bit archaic if you come from a OO side, but it gets it’s job done.
Nils