TxdGen/Optimizing GTA3 Textures

Grand Theft Auto 3 has been released with many uncompressed and palettized textures. This has resulted in huge TXD files on the disk and the game directory. It turns out that the GTA3 engine supports DXTn compression, but Rockstar Games never made use of that. Compressing all the game's world textures is quick and fun. It will dramatically improve the disk space requirement. More importantly compression reduces the memory load of the game. This is critical if you play on low-end hardware or want to add mods to the game. Let's get started!

At the time of writing, TxdGen version 0.9 is current.

If you have any problems following this tutorial, visit the TxdGen topic on GTAForums.

Video tutorial

Directions

Step 1: Requirements

Unlike creating a custom PS2 SA installation, the requirements are simple.

• TxdGen 0.8.3 or newer
• a GTA3 installation

A clean installation of GTA3 is not required.

Step 2: Downloading and Preparing

First off, download the latest version of TxdGen and place it on the desktop.

How to install TxdGen

• Place the downloaded txdgen_*.zip archive onto your desktop
• Right click on the icon and select "Extract All"
• Press the "Extract" button.
• You now have a txdgen_* folder on your desktop

Next we want to configure the tool. Inside of the TxdGen folder you see a txdgen.ini file. This is the central configuration file. You should fiddle around with the settings if you got spare time.

Here is a recommended set of options.

txdgen.ini

[Main]
gameRoot=txdgen_in/
outputRoot=txdgen_out/
targetVersion=GTA3
targetPlatform=PC
generateMipmaps=false
mipGenMode=default
mipGenMaxLevel=6
mipGenSafe=true
compressTextures=true
compressionQuality=1.0
palRuntimeType=PNGQUANT
dxtRuntimeType=SQUISH
warningLevel=1
ignoreSecureWarnings=true
reconstructIMGArchives=true
fixIncompatibleRasters=true
dxtPackedDecompression=false
imgArchivesCompressed=false

Keep the TxdGen directory window around.

GTA3

Then you need to install GTA3 if you have not done so already.

• it is recommended to install it into C:/Program Files/Rockstar Games/GTAIII/.
• open that folder and browse into models/
• you will see gta3.img and txd.img among some TXD files.
• restore the TxdGen window and browse into "txdgen_in/"

Now you need to copy the TXD files that should be converted into the "txdgen_in/" folder. Make sure that you back them up incase you want to restore them.

• gta3.img and gta3.dir
• txd.img and txd.dir
• particle.txd
• generic.txd

All .img files will be processed automatically and rebuilt when the conversion has finished.

Step 3: Converting the Textures

Since everything is in place, all you gotta do now is execute txdgen.exe. A console window will open with debug information. You can follow the progress of conversion in it. It is completely automatic and may take some time, depending on the processing power of your workstation.

If there is any problem with the input texture archives, the converter will output warnings and, in severe cases, errors.

Step 4: Updating the game

Once the console window has closed on its own, the conversion has finished. The output is located in the "txdgen_out/" folder in your TxdGen installation. Browse into it and copy all the files that are inside of it back into the game directory (C:/Program Files/Rockstar Games/GTAIII/models/).

Now you can launch the game and check it out!