Texture loading plugins allow us to move some big libraries like FreeImage into separate optional plugins, and it also allows you to write plugins to load new texture and image formats.

To demonstrate the feature, I have added a working VTF plugin to the GMF2 SDK. This plugin will load Valve texture files used in Source Engine games like Half-Life 2 and Portal. Here are the results, showing a texture loaded directly from VTF format and also displayed in Nem’s nifty VTFEdit tool.

Just like we saw with the MD3 model loader, loading a texture with a plugin is done by first loading the plugin, and then the texture. (Make sure you keep a handle to the plugin or it will be automatically unloaded.)

auto vtfloader = LoadPlugin("Plugins/VTF.dll");
auto tex = LoadTexture("Materials/HL2/gordon.vtf”);

This will be included in the next update to the Turbo Game Engine update, and at that point there is nothing stopping you from creating your own plugins. I hope to someone smart write a plugin for Crunch .crn files, which could cut the size of your game's distribution files down by half.

Unlike the GMF2 model format, which provides fast loading of large model files, my internal texture format ("GTF2") has no advantage over other texture formats, and I do not plan to make standalone files in this format. I recommend using DDS files for textures, using BC7 compression for most images and BC5 for normal maps.