Hi, Obani
And welcome to the forum
The choice of an uncompressed format was made when we created the Blackvoxel engine some years ago.
In order to display a 3D world, textures must be loaded into the video card memory before the game can be launched.
This mean that all textures must be loaded at game start in memory and send to the GPU in a fully uncompressed format.
Storing textures in a compressed format on the disk means we'll had to decompress them all at game launch, which mean adding some time to the startup delay.
Each game engine could make it's own choice about texture formats depending on a lot of parameters.
As most choices in Blackvoxel engine is focused on speed, we naturally made the choice to trade disk space in exchange of more speed.
Even in uncompressed format, the disk space required by Blackvoxel stay very low. Blackvoxel is taking 180MB on disk when a game like Max payne 3 is taking... 35GB
.
That said, it's possible we'll add another texture format for a low footprint version in order to get into USB key game compilation.
The Blackvoxel Team
