Support for BC7 DDS textures
Right now you have to convert BC7 DDS before being able to use them, which is kinda painful(a 4MB BC7 DDS becomes a 64MB TGA for example).
I can't really make a strong case for this. It's probably not a widely needed "feature" unless there's unexpected amount of up-votes on this.
I'm just being hopeful that this is not hard for some kind soul to patch into Blender
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Have you searched if there is an addon for that format ?
If there's a demand, or a "quite popular software" requiring it, someone might have already made something to support that format.
You can open, edit and export DDS files in www.Photopea.com :) BC1 and BC7 compression is available at the export.
I've used DDS a time or two and from what I understand it's popular in some game dev circles. But isn't it a closed format? I don't know of any open-source software that reads .dds, except maybe GIMP.
Also, if I remember correctly, it has some peculiarities that make it different from a normal image file, I think it generates and stores mip-maps.
* @Josephbburg * The specifications of DDS formats are part of DirectX SDK, afaik, so it's no more closed than, say, FBX, which Blender supports. There is BC7 BC6H documentation in the form of an OpenGL Extension khronos.org/registry/OpenGL/extensions/ARB/ARB_texture_compression_bptc.txt . If only I could understand this stuff. Also Krita is going to support it if not already.
* @Sam Kane * I hope it's not anywhere near as closed as FBX... the reason Blender's FBX export isn't great is because Autodesk intentionally obfuscates the format.