Texture compression and backup utility for STALKER GAMMA modlists.
STALKER GAMMA represents a labor of love by hundreds of modders, culminating in a unique and memorable gaming experience. However, the ecosystem ships many texture assets uncompressed. On hardware with limited VRAM, this causes stuttering, hitching, and outright crashes during gameplay. ATAK compresses those textures to BCn block compression formats, dramatically reducing VRAM pressure with minimal visual difference.
Grab the latest binary for your platform from Releases:
| Platform | File |
|---|---|
| Linux x86-64 | atak-vX.X.X-linux-x64.tar.gz |
| Windows x86-64 | atak-vX.X.X-windows-x64.zip |
No installation required.
Linux:
tar -xzf atak-vX.X.X-linux-x64.tar.gz
chmod +x atak-linux
./atak-linuxWindows: Extract the zip, run atak-windows.exe in Windows Terminal or PowerShell.
Back up before you compress. Always.
- Launch ATAK and go to Backup Manager
- Create a backup of your GAMMA mods directory — this is your safety net
- Go to Scan & Compress
- Let it scan your modlist
- Press [m] to compress a single mod first — verify it looks right in game
- If happy, press [r] to compress everything
- If something looks wrong, restore from backup and try again
Compression is always in-place. Your originals are gone after compression — that's what the backup is for.
- Create compressed LZMA archives of your full GAMMA mods directory
- Restore individual mods or your entire modlist from backup
- Verify archive integrity
ATAK scans your modlist for uncompressed DDS textures and classifies them by type using filename patterns and directory paths. Only textures explicitly matched by a profile are compressed — nothing is touched blindly.
| Profile | Format | Detection |
|---|---|---|
| Normal / bump maps | BC5 | _bump, _normal, _nrm, _norm |
| UI / icons | BC3 | textures/ui/ path |
| Diffuse / color | BC7 (BC3 fallback) | _diff, _base, _col, _d |
| Specular / gloss | BC3 | _spec, _gloss |
| Masks / alpha | BC3 | _mask, _alpha |
Already-compressed textures are detected and skipped automatically (~24,000 files in a typical GAMMA install).
Unmatched textures are never touched. Files that don't match any profile are shown in the scan results but excluded from compression. Add patterns to profiles.json to include them.
Config lives at:
- Linux:
~/.config/atak/ - Windows:
%AppData%\atak\
config.json — mods path, backup path, worker count, compression level, scan exclusions
profiles.json — compression profiles created on first run. Edit freely to customize which textures get compressed and with which format. Community-tuned profiles for specific mod packs can be dropped in directly.
Note on BC7 compression: BC7 GPU acceleration is not available on Linux — compression is CPU-only and takes approximately 40-60 minutes for large jobs. Windows users benefit from DirectX GPU acceleration. For faster Linux compression, change BC7 profiles to BC3 in profiles.json — minimal quality difference for most textures.
Benchmarks and feedback welcome — open a GitHub issue or post in the GAMMA Discord.
Default profiles use BC3 for all textures except normal maps (BC5). BC3 produces minimal visible quality loss at typical STALKER viewing distances and is significantly faster to compress on Linux.
For higher quality diffuse textures at the cost of longer compression
time, change "format": "BC3_UNORM" to "format": "BC7_UNORM" in
the Diffuse/Color profile in profiles.json.
- BC7 GPU acceleration Linux-only via DirectX — CPU fallback used on Linux
- Cancelling a compression job deletes the in-progress file — originals untouched
- 7-Zip backup progress reporting is sparse on large solid archives — the archive is growing even when the progress bar appears stuck
Requires Go 1.21+.
git clone https://github.com/noisethanks/atak
cd atak
go build -o atak-linux .Release build:
CGO_ENABLED=0 GOOS=linux GOARCH=amd64 go build \
-ldflags="-s -w -X main.version=v0.1.0" \
-o atak-linux .S.T.A.L.K.E.R. GAMMA is a large modpack for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Anomaly maintained by Grok. Join the community on Discord.
- texconv (Texconv-Custom-DLL) — MIT — matyalatte
- 7-Zip — LGPL v2.1 — Igor Pavlov
- Bubble Tea — MIT — Charmbracelet
- Bubbles — MIT — Charmbracelet
- Lip Gloss — MIT — Charmbracelet
Full license text available in-app via the About screen.
If ATAK saved your playthrough, consider supporting development:
Made by mrchocolate