DDS (DirectDraw Surface)

The .dds extension in KOTOR does not represent a standard Microsoft DirectDraw Surface file. Instead, the engine strictly expects a proprietary format consisting of a bespoke 20-byte configuration prefix followed by raw DXT compression blocks. The vanilla parsing logic completely ignores standard 124-byte DDS magic headers.

At a Glance

Data Model Structure

rakata-formats is built to natively parse both standard Microsoft DDS architecture and KotOR’s proprietary CResDDS format transparently. When evaluating a .dds file via rakata_formats::Dds:

• Bilateral Read Path: If the file begins with the standard Microsoft DDS magic bytes, Rakata leverages a standard pipeline to extract the payload. If those magic bytes are missing, Rakata immediately pivots and parses the data natively as a proprietary K1 CResDDS 20-byte payload.
• Strict Serialization: Regardless of which variation is ingested from the disk, Rakata will strictly emit valid 20-byte KotOR-compliant payloads during binary serialization.

Engine Audits & Decompilation

The following documents the engine’s exact load sequence for DDS textures mapped from swkotor.exe.

(Decompilation logic for this section was audited and verified via native Ghidra pipeline against swkotor.exe, explicitly pulling from CResDDS::GetDDSAttrib at 0x00710ee0.)

Tip

Reserved Gaps: The bytes spanning +0x09 to +0x0B in the header prefix are entirely ignored by the GetDDSAttrib read path. We preserve them strictly for round-trip fidelity.