I am taking a little detour in writing my engine's renderer component. As I am not using the D3DX library I am having to write my own file loaders for textures. Bitmaps are still possible to load through the Windows API but I am having to write my own loader for DDS files. This format is awsome! Mipmaps, alpha transparency, cube, volume and compressed textures etc. Once I get it done I can most likley use this texture format exclusivley in projects built on top of my engine so I need support for it.

This is the first time I have written a loader for someone elses file format rather than my own. It is well explained in the DXSDK documentation though.

I am not using any API specific structures in my code so I see no reason at the moment why this loader could not be used to load DDS files in an OpenGL application.