(2020-06-06, 18:44)Alex Taylor Wrote: Indeed :-)I am not aware of texture loaders that do not use powers of two. The way I see it, you are compromising your work by not scaling.
So this is really a one-off hit we're talking about here, and IMO it's not appropriate to impose a technical limitation of the rendering technology onto parts authors.
The textures for this particular part are (mostly) at 320dpi. I normally work at 640dpi or integer multiples/fractions thereof as it maps very neatly into LDUs. Obviously the final choice of dpi is a tradeoff between the size of the image and the level of detail it needs - this one's 320 because it's not a particularly detailed set of images - but I think forcing authors to work in powers of two will lead to compromises. For example, the top image here covers a width of 29 studs and thus is 2900 pixels wide. The nearest powers of two being 2048 and 4096 mean that either it scales down a bit and (possibly) loses detail, or else it scales up massively for no good reason.
The other issue I see with such a restriction is that it would force the majority of texture images into having non-square pixels (or large areas of blank space, or both).
If you perform the scaling, then you, the author, decides if you want to scale up or down and you, the author, decides the type of scaling to use (nearest neighbour, bilinear interpolation, etc. Or you can let it be up to the texture loaders to decide it all while the end users wait.
I am fine with letting it be up to authors to decide if they want to control the size and type of scaling for texture, but I think they should be aware of the disadvantages.