DDS File Support

[ewforbess]

Adding my request for .dds file support.  It's the only thing keeping me from using Affinity Photo 100% of the time.  Thanks!

 

[Fossil]

DDS support, or at least the ability to use the existing Photoshop plugins such as Intel Textureworks, or the nVidia plugin, are a must-have for game development.

They really are not optional.

I'm currently forced to use an awful mix of Photoshop, Paint.Net and Compressonator to do work that reasonably ought to be handled by Affinity import/export.

 

What's so surprising is that after several years, there still isn't even a firm promise to add this feature, let alone a proposed date to deliver it.

This functionality is useful to just about every game-development house on the planet. It's a huge market of people who would gladly ditch Photoshop if they could - but this missing feature continues to lock people into Adobe.

 

Muddled posts from non-developers who think that BC7 is not relevant to Mac users do not understand that these formats are supported by AMD and nVidia hardware. They are largely old, well established, not subject to unnecessary change, and are relevant on all platforms that have modern rendering hardware, including phones. Most of the formats were introduced in the early nineties, and are still in use today in hardware on practically every modern smartphone, every Mac, and every PC.

 

I still don't understand why Affinity marketing think this is a niche feature that can be ignored indefinitely. I've looked past this for years, naively convincing myself that it would soon be added, but I'm coming to the realization that there is no intention to add this feature at all and that Affinity marketing and development don't seem to grasp what it is, or why it matters to a large market segment who would otherwise be eager to embrace Affinity products.

Finally, I've reached a point where working with BC7 is becoming unworkably awkward with Affinity Photo in my toolchain and I had to make a forum account just to raise this one issue.

I've never had any other complaint about Affinity. What does this say?

What is the long-term value of Affinity to me if I'm still obliged to pay Adobe, year after year?

Even if Affinity is cheap, it's still cheaper to only pay for only one product. Sure, my existing purchases aren't going away, but if I'm not opening up Affinity, and I'm constantly opening Photoshop, when the next tranche of pay-to-update releases from Affinity come around where is my incentive? It seems more and more with every new release that Affinity Photo is fixated on competing against Lightroom, a product I don't use and know little about. It's a disappointment for me, that after eagerly adopting it some time ago, that I'm just not in a market where Affinity is headed. The effort invested in learning Affinity Photo is, apparently, wasted.

I really have two major expectations from an image editor: making textures seamlessly loopable, and being able to quickly edit compressed textures during iterative development. Yes, the majority of my textures go through an automated pipeline that uses lossless sources and compresses them during the asset building process, there's still a huge need to get in there and mess with textures on the fly, to make an effect look just right, or tweak an alpha channel. Photoshop has both of these tasks nailed in a way that Affinity does not, albeit with third-party plugins, but it is at least possible to make seamless textures in Affinity Photo, and the process is ok; it just lacks the first-class treatment that liquify and develop have received. In contrast, there's nothing I can do about compressed textures with Affinity Photo. I can't load them and I can't save them. Affinity Photo doesn't even have a seat at the table. Of course I want my editor to do other things, but all the alternatives handle the basics to a satisfactory level.

On reflection, I'm amazed that Paint.Net, a free product, has up-to-date functionality for loading and saving compressed textures, yet Affinity Photo - which has been a leader in other areas - assumes you'll manually convert to and from these formats using something else just to get them in and out of the wonderful Affinity world.

If Affinity only has features that are nice, but lacks feature that are essential, it's going to lose in a toss-up against Photoshop, which has all the essential features, even if the interface is composed almost entirely of special cases.

Edited August 3, 2020 by Fossil

[Marcurios]

I agree entirely with the above post, but i already ditched Affinity 6 months after i bought it cause i read that people asked for DDS support for years, i'm not going to spend my time waitng and wanting.
I also won't pay Adobe every month for a product that is extremely buggy (CC desktop app mainly making working with their software often impossible).
So i just installed my old Photoshop 6 copy and keep working with that, and forget about software that doesn't do anything for us gamedevs.

I still think Affinity is missing out on a huge marketshare though simply by ignoring the gaming development market.
And i also think that if they don't add it now, that they will be too late cause other software is probably jumping into this in the forseeable future.
Cause game developing is getting more and more relevant these days.

[Fossil]

I think the problem here is that Affinity CR don't see a lot of posts on this topic, so they conclude that nobody really cares about it.

As Marcurios implies, the people who need this feature are walking away from Affinity before making a purchase. They aren't posting on Affinity forums making feature requests because this feature is such a barrier to entry that they don't even consider Affinity as a potential solution.

I've seen the same issue with Microsoft. Unless users are dog-piling onto a feature request, it will never get done, but the nature of this request is such that existing Affinity users aren't going to post about it.

That's the problem if you only survey existing users - you end up chasing diminishing returns for people who were already mostly satisfied, not bringing in major new groups of users who had a major obstacle to adoption.

I should imagine there are groups of web-developers who find Affinity's weak jpeg and png export features a blocker to adoption, and they aren't posting on forums either.

 

I don't know how Affinity pick features for development, but I suspect that feature requests in the forums are heavily weighted, and thus we're seeing minor tweaks for users who are already well supported, not major new features that could grow the user base. I thought that once Publisher was released some of the long-standing feature gaps in Photo might get more attention, but I guess that was naive.

 

In the game-development community, nobody is evangelizing Affinity, because they would look like an idiot proposing swapping to a tool that can't load any processed assets.

It certainly can't be used to batch-convert a folder of texture assets to preview compression artifacts.

While an individual can get by with an ancient copy of Photoshop, that's not a practical solution for a studio that needs to license artist-seats and be audit-ready. You end up buying that stuff, in bulk, on subscription because Adobe made anything else practically unworkable.

Edited August 7, 2020 by Fossil

[Mystical]

I'm definitely still hoping one day DDS support can come. They added TGA support last year and it has been invaluable for me. Right behind JPG and PNG I pretty much am exporting files with the TGA format daily. I'd definitely get good use out of a robust DDS export format as well.

[R_G]

For what it's worth, I'd also welcome DDS support as it would be quite useful.

[Raylee]

Dear Affinity Developers,

I would be very pleased if you could start the development for .dds formats (DirectDraw Surface).

Maybe it is possible to work with NVIDIA together to get the result.
https://developer.nvidia.com/nvidia-texture-tools-exporter

Currently I cannot fully integrate my workflow into Affinity because of the not supported .dds files.
(I still have to use other Image editing programs for doing the work which need .dds support)

 

Do not forget:

• With full integration of .dds file format support you will win new customers from the following areas:
  (Game design, 3d Artists, etc.)

 

 

Best regards

[Raylee]

Dear @Mark Ingram

Could you do anything about this?

 

Best regards

[fde101]

The Serif team does not normally respond to feature requests.

They do sometimes, but not usually.

They do read them and determine their priorities internally, not on a voting system or by popular request.

[Marcurios]

They're not going to be there in the long run, for instance, i bought Affinity only to ditch it after a few weeks and go back to Photoshop because of this.
I probably never buy another  Affinity product again, and i'm sure that if they don't make the program work like Photoshop, that Photoshop will always stay Nr.1.
Adding dds support is just a little work compared to other things they're doing, it's kinda dumb that they didn't add it after all these years.
Or add the .8bf plugin functionality.

Mark my words, in ten years nobody talks about Affinity anymore like the way they did a few years ago.
It was said to be a serious contender to Photoshop, but we all know that  this is no longer the case.
Even GIMP is better.

[DMullerDesign]

If it's any incentive whatsoever, I would pay for a plugin that provided this functionality. At the moment I endlessly export as png, then use a third-party application to convert to .dds – what a flipping drag on workflow. A graphics tool, despite having 'photo' in the title isn't just used by photographers, in fact, the market share if you only aim AP at photographers is tiny when compared to all the thousands that create graphics for games and applications.

So if it helps recoup some of the cost for the development, sure, I'd pay for a plugin that would ease my workflow.

[Marcurios]

It's no use, people have been asking for years, devs do not reply.
They said years ago that it wasn't on their priority list, and they don't reply to any of the posts on this thread.
So i wouldn't hold your breath for it.

it's probably best to forget about Affinity alltogether.
I thought it was promising at first, but i have been doing some comparisons with Photoshop CC and Affinity, the filters from Photoshop CC and the codecs they use are by far superior to any of the filters and codecs used in Affinity, so it might be a nice product for hobbyists, but it sadly can't compare to the quality of Photoshop.
I only wished they made a offline mode for CC, that would make me never check other products again.

[InfaRed]

Wow, all this obvious market for .dds support and still no support ? Come on Serif !

 

Anyway, +1 here on .dds support. Please implicate it exact how PS does though, cause you could mess up a good thing otherwise. Mandatory BC1-7 compression options. MipMap generation, normal map generation, etc..

 

Thanks for your consideration

[Kiarian]

+1 this. I'm just about to buy the game F1 2020 (PC version). You can create your own custom livery and import it into the game. But, uses .dds support. Check Affinity.... nope. 
I remember not too long back Affinity had no TGA support which it does now, so I'm hoping this will be another option to export than can simply be added to the software, pretty please!

[fmmcgee]

I too would like to see DDS support. With all the people trying to create custom liveries for MS Flight Simulator 2020 there could be a new bunch of customers for Affinity Photo.

[ryobg]

Well, I might be minority and while I consider DDS opening / saving as a nice feature, I don't think is so critical or important. Usually, it's just one more step to convert from your exported raster to a DDS file using an external & specialised tool. At general case, it might be even just drag & drop / double click operation (if you have made a simple batch script for example). Also, it comes to mind, Unreal Engine for example, does not accept DDS files, it wants to compress them instead.

[oliiix]

On 1/24/2018 at 11:54 AM, tfriberg said:

Until we hopefully get support for DDS 8.8.8.8 RGBA in Affinity Designer/Photo I save as png's and (as I am on Mac) use Lemkesoft's Graphic Converter to save as DDS. I mailed and asked Torsten to add support for DDS and he had a beta I could try two weeks after my request . It's no longer only in beta 

 

Isn't that a bad idea because you loose information from the hdr file when you save it to png? Meaning if you wanna light something with the dds texture then the lighting is incorrect.

 

+ 1 voting this up, need this as well :)

[ryobg]

6 hours ago, oliiix said:

Isn't that a bad idea because you loose information from the hdr file when you save it to png? Meaning if you wanna light something with the dds texture then the lighting is incorrect.

 

+ 1 voting this up, need this as well

Converting HDR to most other formats is likely a loss of information. The idea that you can convert a generic hdr, png, bmp, even jpg to most DDS formats and you won't loose information is misleading too.

[tfriberg]

8 hours ago, oliiix said:

Isn't that a bad idea because you loose information from the hdr file when you save it to png? Meaning if you wanna light something with the dds texture then the lighting is incorrect.

 

+ 1 voting this up, need this as well

As I am only making 2d sprites/icons/frames/backgrounds for grand strategy games, this has not been an issue.

[oliiix]

I have now downloaded NVidia Texture Tools from their homepage. Exported the cubemap I built to EXR. Then converted it to the correct dds format that unreal engine needs, easy peasy

I tried Lemkesoft's Application, but this just saves DDS with predefined values that weren't read by unreal engine. For everyone needing specific DDS "formats" I can recommend NVIDIA Texture Tools!!

https://developer.nvidia.com/nvidia-texture-tools-exporter

(you need to have a free nvidia dev account for it, but that's quickly set up )

[tfriberg]

11 minutes ago, oliiix said:

(you need to have a free nvidia dev account for it, but that's quickly set up )

And a Windows machine it seems. No luck for OSX peeps.

[paristo]

Came to check that does the Affinity support DDS files and was sad that not yet. Well, maybe in the 2.x series in the future.... With all the layers and mipmaps and all....

[Razr]

I do a lot of modding for Hearts of Iron IV, and I would LOVE to see affinity have DDS support. I despise having to use apps like gimp when I have something amazing like APhoto and ADesigner. It just doesn't make since that it doesn't support DDS yet.

[tfriberg]

I work at Paradox on HoI4 and previously on Stellaris which was why I asked for .dds support ;)

[Luchian]

+1 DDS support please.

It would be the final step in Affinity adoption, since more than 50% of graphic work I do is for texturing.
I know that there are "workarounds", but in a workflow with many trails & tests that means a LOT of lost time.

Please guys, consider it. I am sure number of users needing this is way bigger than those that wrote on the forums. Even if not, it'd be the perfect occasion to enter the gaming segment.