Textures from Blue Byte games Incubation (1997) and Extreme Assault (1997)

[micTronic]

Hi,

I'm trying to understand the image format used for textures in the video game Incubation and Extreme Assault (both by Blue Byte and from 1997). For their time, these games had quite advanced, mesh-based 3d engines.

They are compressed 256*256 pixel textures, embedded inside a "textures.lib" file, probably expanding to RGB565 format and therefore 131072 bytes. The 12 byte header including the magic dword, size word, and probably some flag/version is always the same per game.

A GPT "deep research" assumes that it's either a LZSS-variant (in old games, Blue Byte used a so-called TPWM “Turbo Packer” method) or an early BC1/DXT1-like block stream. I'm not familiar enough with compression to confirm either of these.

I have already tried searching the web for the VISN fourcc, but no luck anywhere. Also no obvious hints in the game's executables or DLLs.

I have attached 3 separate examples. Any ideas on their compression format?

Incubation_Texture_Examples.zip