The old version, before 0.6F7, did a conversion on loading each texture that was in the wrong format, into the right format, every time it loaded. There was no "converting" message, because DirectX did it invisibly. The new version will save it out again in the correct format if needed, so there is no conversion the next time it loads.
The converting message you saw with skins converting jpg to dds is not related in any way to this.
This new system doesn't result in 0.1 second load time improvements. For people with many wrong textures this could result in several seconds faster load times. Even with default LFS textures there was an improvement.
Not all the dds texture are DXT3. The non-transparent textures in LFS use DXT1 because it uses half the memory of DXT3.
But as Daniel said, it's better not to use his tool now because LFS will use the correct format. Daniel's tool no longer chooses the correct format in all cases, now that I changed the format of the ATEST files. In F9 you will see that there are no more textures with name ending ATEST and ALPHA because they will now be named _ALP and their alpha rendering type is specified in our editor rather than by the file name ending.
By the way, LFS does file renaming so people with custom texture packs will still be able to see their custom textures even with the new file name style.
The converting message you saw with skins converting jpg to dds is not related in any way to this.
This new system doesn't result in 0.1 second load time improvements. For people with many wrong textures this could result in several seconds faster load times. Even with default LFS textures there was an improvement.
Not all the dds texture are DXT3. The non-transparent textures in LFS use DXT1 because it uses half the memory of DXT3.
But as Daniel said, it's better not to use his tool now because LFS will use the correct format. Daniel's tool no longer chooses the correct format in all cases, now that I changed the format of the ATEST files. In F9 you will see that there are no more textures with name ending ATEST and ALPHA because they will now be named _ALP and their alpha rendering type is specified in our editor rather than by the file name ending.
By the way, LFS does file renaming so people with custom texture packs will still be able to see their custom textures even with the new file name style.
