PVRTC support in cocos2d

From cocos2d v0.7 onwards you can use non-raw PVRTC (PVR Texture compression) images. (Raw PVRTC images are supported since v0.5.2)

In order to load a non-raw PVRTC image you can use the same API that you were using to load PNG/BMP/JPEG images. eg:

// Sprite using PVRTC file
Sprite *img = [Sprite spriteWithFile:@"test_image.pvr"];

// Texture Atlas with PVRTC file
TextureAtlas *textureAtlas = [TextureAtlas textureAtlasWithFile: @"atlastest.pvr" capacity:3];

// TileMapAtlas with PVR file
TileMapAtlas *tilemap = [TileMapAtlas tileMapAtlasWithTileFile:@"tiles.pvr" mapFile:@"levelmap.tga" tileWidth:16 tileHeight:16];

// LabelAtlas with PVR file
LabelAtlas *label = [LabelAtlas labelAtlasWithString:@"123 Test" charMapFile:@"tuffy_bold_italic-charmap.pvr" itemWidth:48 itemHeight:64 startCharMap:' '];

As you can see, the PVRTC support is transparent .
Using PVRTC files has the following benefits:

• It reduces the loading time (less footprint)
• It is faster, for it consumes less bandwidth
• It is also faster, since it implies less texture switches because more textures can be in memory at the same time (I might be wrong on this one :)
  

To convert a PNG file to PVRTC use this step:

/Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/Developer/usr/bin/texturetool -e PVRTC -f PVR --channel-weighting-linear --bits-per-pixel-4 -o test_image.pvr test_image.png

Edit: Fixed grammar errors