HD art and derived maps

The engine reads PNG and TGA directly. A texture is resolved by its stem: it looks for ART\<name>.PNG, then .TGA, then .RAW. So a model that records FOO.RAW will happily use FOO.PNG if that is what the pod carries — the recorded extension is a hint, not an instruction.

The legacy pair is optional

This means the .RAW / .ACT pair is no longer required. Shipping HD art on its own is a legitimate choice, not a broken pod, and often a much smaller one — the legacy pair is frequently several times the size of the source it was made from.

The palette belongs to the .RAW and only to it. HD art carries its own colour, so a .PNG with no .ACT beside it is correct, not incomplete. C-POD will not warn you about a missing .RAW, offer to regenerate one, or drop a PNG for having no palette next to it.

Four maps found by name

Four more maps are found the same way — by name, referenced by nothing:

Name	What it is
`<stem>_N`	normal map
`<stem>_AO`	ambient occlusion
`<stem>_DTL`	terrain detail normal
`<stem>_MASK`	terrain detail mask

You add one by naming it correctly and putting it in the pod. Nothing records the link and nothing has to. Whatever carries FOO into a pod carries FOO_N with it — including when FOO is a legacy .RAW with an HD normal beside it, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to ship.

Why this matters when you are packing. A derived map is referenced by nothing, so any tool that builds a file list by following references will miss every one of them. That is why C-POD looks for them by name instead: a truck whose normal maps were dropped in packing looks fine in a file listing and flat in the game.

Keep a stem to 18 characters and they all fit. ART\ plus 18 plus _MASK plus .PNG is exactly the 31 a pod entry holds — which is why 18 is the number, rather than a round figure somebody picked. See Filenames and their limits.