I want to know your expirience using DDS textures in models. How can achieve mipmaps because when I use DDS, mipmaps are disabled and I cant check it.
normal 256*256 BMP texture is 190KB and DDS is only 36KB, that can take to significant improovement of loading time.
Is there any afection to loading time because diference in size between MDL5 and MDL7 (mdl7 is 3 times bigger in KB). MDL5 should load 3 times faster, or I am wrong.

DDS has been invented by Microsoft as DirectX texture format. DDS files are loaded with highspeed into the graphics card memory because its is saved in the native graphics card file format (so to say). DDS files are as well compressed, so if they are e.g. 36kb big, they take only 36kb of graphics memory. DDS tools allow natively to create mipmaps and store them as well in the DDS file, so time is saved again when loading it. I dont know which tool you use, but I prefer using the ATI compressonator for solid textures.

Dont use MDL5, it is added in the MED export/import list only for historical reasons. The engine is optimized for MDL7 loading.

DDS seems intriguing, very cool guys. Excuse my blunt questions but besides mini maps is there any other practicle uses for DDS (why or why not)? And how would I go about building and using these? Just thought I would ask because anything that would increase loading time and any other speed for that matter is a good thing .

Well, when you take a 1024x1024 TGA texture, its quite BIG (~3 MB only RGB color, 4MB with alpha channel). If you save it with RLE compression, you can save HD space, though, inside your graphics card there is no real difference. You can actually force A6 to compress ALL textures, but this would be worse: it has to load those big texture to compress it again. It is actually faster to load an already compressed texture with precalculated mipmaps. In addition, DDS textures are in most cases (even with precalculated mipmaps) smaller than its TGA counterpart. There are a lot of tools around to create DDS texture. I recommend the ATI compressonator for solid textures and the NVidia toolchain for RGBA textures (this has a reason: while accepting the solid RGB DDS files composed with the ATI compressonator, WED/MED and A6 raise directX errors when displaying/rendering them. I had no problems when I compiled RGBA DDS files with the NVidia tools.

Decreasing memory consumption and loading times are suitable especially for games or levels with a great amount of massive graphics (big textures, fine grained skins, shaders, terrains, panels (as well!), etc.).

That I want to now, is it any quirks with DDS files and 3DGS. I dont want to convert 200 models and to discover that it is buggy because it is pretty new feature.
If someone expirience some issues with DDS please report here.
Thnx

I have expierenced overlay issues when using DDS textures. For example, if you use the same texture twice, and the two entities using the same texture overlap in the 3D world, one will become invisible... blending together.

I have very limited expierence with DDS, because after I expierenced this problem, I simply stoped using them. However, there may be a fix for this issue...

Regards,
Raddaddy

@Rad_Daddy: That sounds like the usual overlay problem when using models with alpha channels. Try the following ffp to hopefully fix that problem:

http://www.coniserver.net/wiki/index.php/ImprovedOverlay

indeed, and, in addition, models with applied RGBA _DDS_ skin are getting obscure rendering/zbuffer errors. Use this material to circumvent that.