![]() If Affinity only has features that are nice, but lacks feature that are essential, it's going to lose in a toss-up against Photoshop, which has all the essential features, even if the interface is composed almost entirely of special cases. On reflection, I'm amazed that Paint.Net, a free product, has up-to-date functionality for loading and saving compressed textures, yet Affinity Photo - which has been a leader in other areas - assumes you'll manually convert to and from these formats using something else just to get them in and out of the wonderful Affinity world. Of course I want my editor to do other things, but all the alternatives handle the basics to a satisfactory level. I can't load them and I can't save them. Affinity Photo doesn't even have a seat at the table. In contrast, there's nothing I can do about compressed textures with Affinity Photo. Photoshop has both of these tasks nailed in a way that Affinity does not, albeit with third-party plugins, but it is at least possible to make seamless textures in Affinity Photo, and the process is ok it just lacks the first-class treatment that liquify and develop have received. Yes, the majority of my textures go through an automated pipeline that uses lossless sources and compresses them during the asset building process, there's still a huge need to get in there and mess with textures on the fly, to make an effect look just right, or tweak an alpha channel. I really have two major expectations from an image editor: making textures seamlessly loopable, and being able to quickly edit compressed textures during iterative development. The effort invested in learning Affinity Photo is, apparently, wasted. It's a disappointment for me, that after eagerly adopting it some time ago, that I'm just not in a market where Affinity is headed. Sure, my existing purchases aren't going away, but if I'm not opening up Affinity, and I'm constantly opening Photoshop, when the next tranche of pay-to-update releases from Affinity come around where is my incentive? It seems more and more with every new release that Affinity Photo is fixated on competing against Lightroom, a product I don't use and know little about. What is the long-term value of Affinity to me if I'm still obliged to pay Adobe, year after year?Įven if Affinity is cheap, it's still cheaper to only pay for only one product. I've never had any other complaint about Affinity. I've looked past this for years, naively convincing myself that it would soon be added, but I'm coming to the realization that there is no intention to add this feature at all and that Affinity marketing and development don't seem to grasp what it is, or why it matters to a large market segment who would otherwise be eager to embrace Affinity products.įinally, I've reached a point where working with BC7 is becoming unworkably awkward with Affinity Photo in my toolchain and I had to make a forum account just to raise this one issue. I still don't understand why Affinity marketing think this is a niche feature that can be ignored indefinitely. Most of the formats were introduced in the early nineties, and are still in use today in hardware on practically every modern smartphone, every Mac, and every PC. They are largely old, well established, not subject to unnecessary change, and are relevant on all platforms that have modern rendering hardware, including phones. Muddled posts from non-developers who think that BC7 is not relevant to Mac users do not understand that these formats are supported by AMD and nVidia hardware. ![]() ![]() It's a huge market of people who would gladly ditch Photoshop if they could - but this missing feature continues to lock people into Adobe. This functionality is useful to just about every game-development house on the planet. What's so surprising is that after several years, there still isn't even a firm promise to add this feature, let alone a proposed date to deliver it. I'm currently forced to use an awful mix of Photoshop, Paint.Net and Compressonator to do work that reasonably ought to be handled by Affinity import/export. DDS support, or at least the ability to use the existing Photoshop plugins such as Intel Textureworks, or the nVidia plugin, are a must-have for game development.
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