Making DDS files. Mipmaps included

Mipmaps are a sort of collection of images that accompany the main texture. The purpose of using mipmaps is to increase the rendering speed and reduce aliasing artifacts. Rendering speed increases since the number of texture pixels being processed can be much lower than with simple textures. They are efficient when there is a necessity to improve the image detail when it is scaled up or down – the image will not look blurry and will get higher resolution. Mipmaps are widely used for 3D computer graphics – computer games, simulators, etc. Normally, the DDS image format is widely used in game development. The advantages of DDS include the ability to be loaded directly in RAM without any modification, speeding up the loading time; to stay compressed in RAM, saving RAM space. DDS files can contain information that normal images won’t support: mipmaps, cube maps, volume textures. Most image files support RGB or RGBA data only. DDS files also support a larger variety of formats: DXT, RGB565, RGBA4444, etc. Because they can store mipmaps, they can often be loaded faster, since mipmaps don’t need to be generated. To use the DDS format successfully with mipmap levels option, the size of the image you are saving should be equal to a power of two (128, 512, 1024 etc.).