DXTex rewrite using DirectXTex

[walbourn]

The legacy DirectX SDK included the DirectX Texture Tool (DXTEX.EXE), a venerable MFC-based application for viewing all the various components of a DDS file, doing conversions, and creating more complex surfaces in an interactive manner. This tool suffers from numerous issues including no support for "modern" .DDS files, Direct3D 9 only, uses legacy D3DX9, etc.

A new tool should be created that replicates all the existing functionality using DirectXTex including full support for "DX10' DDS files; BC4, BC5, BC6H, and BC7 compression; texture arrays; and height-map to normal map conversions.

[walbourn]

Visual Studio already has support for viewing 'modern' DDS files and uses DirectXTex internally. The IDE can open DDS files and view the mipmaps, and even do some basic editing, but lacks some of the functions for building cubemaps etc interactively.

texassemble already provides a command-line way to do the constructions of complex surfaces, and texconv provides extensive command-line support for conversions, mips generation, etc.

[walbourn]

A project to update the original MFC project can be found here.