Adding Media to Your Game - Wizards and Warriors: Massively Multiplayer Online Game Creation - page 123

Textures:
n BMP: The Bitmap file format is a common graphics format used in
print, web, and game creation. It is supported in most free and paid
graphics packages and you will have no problems finding a package that
will support it (for example, Windows Paint).
n JPG: The JPG format (also called JPEG) became extremely popular for
use on web pages on the Internet. The format is very good at reducing
the file size of an image by reducing the quality of the graphics image.
Some images can look extremely low quality when using JPG at its
highest settings, so there is a trade-off between image quality and size.
The JPG format is widely supported by art packages.
n PNG: PNG is a lossless data compression format; this means the format
can reduce the overall file size of the file while keeping the quality high.
The file is compressed and once opened needs to be uncompressed.
This can lead to large memory usage in games with lots of images.
As with BMP and JPG, this format is widely supported.
n DDS: The DDS (Direct Draw Surface) format was created by Microsoft,
initially for use in DirectX applications (starting from DirectX 7). You
can find out more about DDS format at the following web link:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb943990(v=VS.85).aspx.
n TGA: The TGA format is not widely used and you may find issues with
packages not supporting this format.
Sound:
n Wav: WAV is a popular sound format that has been in use for many
years. The only general downside of using WAV is that its sound files
can be quite large. The WAV format is supported by many applications,
such as Windows Sound Recorder, and music players such as iTunes and
Windows media player.
n OGG: As WAV files can be quite large, other formats have become more
popular in use, and one such format is MP3. One potential issue when
using MP3 within games is that there may be a potential charge for