COMPUTER MASALA: Texture Packs

Monday, 25 June 2012

Texture Packs

A texture pack is a collection of files that is used to change the in-game textures of blocks, items, mobs and the GUI. They are zip files that have various PNG images in them and a pack.txt. The native resolution of Minecraft's Texture is 16×16 (measured pixels in block height and width). 32×32, 64×64, 128×128, 256×256 and 512×512 are referred to as ‘HD’ and requires third party modifications to run correctly. A very common patcher is MCPatcher or the mod Optifine (which improves performance) and has an HD patch built in. The crash with high resolution texture packs was fixed, but they still don't work correctly with the unpatched client. The game will run, but due to the different size of the texture files, some textures will appear within other textures, such as small fire animations appearing on grass blocks. The errors differ between packs and resolutions. Texture packs can be read without being in a .zip file, which allows the use of the "texture pack reloading" key (which is F3 + T).