[Unknown Target]

Two things I'd like to see happen in the source are:

The ability to use .bmp files for textures.

The ability to play multiplayer with mods insalled. (multiplayer FOR the mods;))

[RandomTiger]

Originally posted by Unkown Target
Two things I'd like to see happen in the source are:

The ability to use .bmp files for textures.

The ability to play multiplayer with mods insalled. (multiplayer FOR the mods;))

The bmp thing could be something we could do as part of the DX8 upgrade. Why not use tga's instead though?

However Im told the internet multiplayer code was stripped out so dont hold your breath.

[KARMA]

Originally posted by RandomTiger



However Im told the internet multiplayer code was stripped out so dont hold your breath.

you mean that the multiplayer isnt present at all in the releases of scproject?

[RandomTiger]

I think you can play of a LAN but no PXO support or whatever it was

[Nico]

Originally posted by RandomTiger


The bmp thing could be something we could do as part of the DX8 upgrade. Why not use tga's instead though?

However Im told the internet multiplayer code was stripped out so dont hold your breath.

TGA would be awesome...BUT! who is gonna download 120Mb big map packs?

[Fury]

Scrap bmb, use jpg and tga instead.

[Unknown Target]

Not tga. If anything, I'd prefer .jpg.

[RandomTiger]

Dx8 has D3DXCreateTextureFromFile which lets you load the following formats in one line of code:

.bmp, .dds, .dib, .jpg, .png, and .tga.

But I can only get it to work for 32 bit texturing.

I would have thought tga would become popular because you can store a proper alpha channel so we can mix multiple textures and stuff like that.

[Stryke 9]

Sounds good. Don't know why you'd need anything other than 32-bit, anyway. That's better than about 90% of games, and more than you can see. And Photoshop supports it, last I looked.

[vyper]

Originally posted by RandomTiger
Dx8 has D3DXCreateTextureFromFile which lets you load the following formats in one line of code:

.bmp, .dds, .dib, .jpg, .png, and .tga.

But I can only get it to work for 32 bit texturing.

I would have thought tga would become popular because you can store a proper alpha channel so we can mix multiple textures and stuff like that.

[IceFire]

Wait a minute...32bits in the texture itself, or 32bit color in the game.  Because 32bit color just doesn't perform well enough for me to use it.  Unless DX8 changes things

[Sesquipedalian]

32-bit colour isn't good enough for you, IceFire?  FS2 currently uses mere 8-bit colour, allowing 256 colours per texture.  32-bit colour gives you 4 294 967 296 colours.

[Solatar]

How about 16 million color bitmaps?

[daveb]

Originally posted by Sesquipedalian
32-bit colour isn't good enough for you, IceFire?  FS2 currently uses mere 8-bit colour, allowing 256 colours per texture.  32-bit colour gives you 4 294 967 296 colours.

I dunno what gave you that idea. FS2 uses 16 bit textures across the board. There's no support for paletted anything except in Fred.

NOTE : this is rather old fashioned in today's gaming terms. Back when FS2 came out, being an all hardware, non-paletted texture across-the-board game was a pretty big deal.

[phreak]

any way we could make fred use a hardware renderer?  the way the paletting works, the nebula textures are often distorted.

[daveb]

Sure. Its just a time investment. Windowed D3D is pretty easy these days. Although you may find OpenGL a little easier to merge with MFC. Right now the rendering in Fred is totally old-school. Hand optimized inner-loop software texture mapping. Kind of a hidden marvel among all the crud of the source base.

[phreak]

i've done some opengl, but not using MFC.  it should be a worthwhile investment

where's the "shoot myself in the head smiliey" i need for the asm code in fs2 (i gotta learn that too)

[daveb]

I wouldn't bother. While knowing "assembly" in general is a good thing, knowing Intel assembly is of questionable value these days. And figuring out how the various tmappers of FS2 work has about the same utility as understanding how to build a suit of chainmail.

[LtNarol]

use jpgs for texture maps? drugs is bad mkay? zsoft works better than jpgs, and tgas are far better; and yes, they are supported by PSP.  I dunno about you, but alpha channels for texture maps would be incredible.

[Fury]

Originally posted by Sesquipedalian
32-bit colour isn't good enough for you, IceFire?  FS2 currently uses mere 8-bit colour, allowing 256 colours per texture.  32-bit colour gives you 4 294 967 296 colours.

You understood him wrong.
He meant that 32 bit gives too slow performance for him.

32 bit is a bit sluggish indeed, hopefully DX8 improves this.

Edit: Later when we have (if we have...) both DX8 and OGL (1.2?) support, wouldn't it be necessary to include hardware acceleration settings for FRED2 as well? So you can choose between DX and OGL hardware accelerated windowed mode.

My own opinion is that even though dave said that OGL would be easier to implement, shouldn't you go with full DX8 support first? Then we have both APIs later supported in both FS2 and FRED2.

DaveB: Sorry to disturb you with my question, but do know any issues about FS2 multiplayer code and how it fares with mods? I mean, there is some crashing with mod missions in multiplayer...