What are the pro’s and cons for PNG,TGA,JPG,GIF,TIF, etc in unity games?
what takes less space, what is good for alpha channel, what is fast to read from?
Just go with .PNG or PSD. no matter what you use Unity will Convert them to DDS DXT5(not always DXT5) when you build or when you run the game. I say PNG because it readily supports Alpha and generally small anyway. but its all personal preference.
Also don’t try import DDS files(using the Photoshop plugin), it doesn’t quite work… might be unity trying convert a DDS to a DDS…
I ran into memory problems with transparent png sequences. The data file size was huge and the game itself wouldn’t build properly. The animation was very glitchy. I tried using tgas instead of pngs and now the data file is much smaller and the game builds properly. The pngs were sprite textures I tagged for use in an atlas. I’ll probably use tgas from now on.
For anyone who might be interested… As Fornoreason said but with more details, check
the answers for why small size textures on disk become huge in build
Irrespective of a format which you import, Unity transfers everything to .psd with layers. For pictures without channel alpha you can use .jpeg (less space). For an alpha of the channel it is better to use .png.