[ChronoReverse]

Check out these two images.  Can you tell which is the .tga and which is the .dds file?  Both were converted to PNG in photoshop.







The .tga is about 4.2MB while the .dds is about 1.4MB

I'm thinking about converting every .tga in my effects folder into a .dds

Fs2_open is able to load a .dds in every situation it can load a .tga right?

[Lightspeed]

which settings do you use?

All images I convert with it come out horrible.

[ChronoReverse]

DXT5     ARGB     (Interpolated Alpha)
2D Texture
Generate MIP maps

The rest on default.

Using version 6.52 of the plugin.

I've went ahead and decompressed the media vp, converted every .tga to .dds

The game still seems to run fine and I can still see things.  Will be testing more.




BTW, is it possible to convert all those .pcx files into .dds as well?


P.S.  All you people making effects, use widths and heights at 2^n values!!!!  (so many .tga's at a resolution like 128x514.... 514!!!)





[edit]  
If I replace all the .pcx files with a .dds, would FS2_open be able to handle that?


P.S.  Incidentally, Lightspeed's hi-res planets actually look better in-game with DDS since the mip-maps reduces the "flicker" effect seen in areas of the planets with high detail (look at the planet in the first mission to see what I mean).
[/edit]

[Lightspeed]

they look worse. Tons worse. And the game will NOT use the DDS mipmaps at all.

Could you send me a zip with yours in DDS format to look at?

If it's better than what I could convert, i'll update the DDS zip of my planets.

[ChronoReverse]

Check your pm box

[J3Vr6]

Sweet... you think you'll put this all up somewhere so people can do use them instead of the big files, Chrono?  Probably would shrink the amount of video memory used in-mission, right?

[Lightspeed]

uhhh....i'll post something in a second about this...

[RandomTiger]

Lightspeed, did you ever try that app I gave you?

[Lightspeed]

Either

a) you posted wrong images
or
b) DDS work different on our systems.

I opened the exact file you sent me.

Here's the comparison

TGA

No artifacts or edges whatsoever, looks exactly like the images you posted.

DDS

Look at the vertical "lines", the odd boxes in the glow, and the ugly colour cutting edge at the shadow (where it fades to 0,0,0, for exampe at the 'south pole'). It looks ugly (the other planets are even worse!)

[Lightspeed]

Originally posted by RandomTiger
Lightspeed, did you ever try that app I gave you?

Yes I did. It looks slightly better, but still bad.

[Flipside]

I see what you mean there LS, it's almost like the image was being dropped in colour-count.

Were you using the exact same settings as Chrono?

[ChronoReverse]

I've definitely opened both files (the dds AND the tga) in Photoshop CS at the same time.

Then I used Save as for web to convert to PNGs.

In any case, they can't be the same file since the PNG file sizes are different.

Very strange, I wonder why this is happening.  I'll have to take a look again when I get home.

[Lightspeed]

@ flipside: not only that, i was using THE SAME FILE he was using.

[ChronoReverse]

Which is why it's really weird

I saw the horrible artifacts when using DXT1 and DXT3, but when I noticed that DXT5 seems to be pretty good, I converted.

[Flipside]

Then the only difference is that you posted JPG and Chrono posted PNG's. But you had obviously seen the error before you posted, so I don't think it's that

Edit : Besides, both your pictures are JPG's so if that were the case, they would both be showing those errors.

[Lightspeed]

I used maximum JPG quality (thus the big JPG files) for the DDS one.

[ChronoReverse]

That isn't the problem.  I saved to PNG for lossless, but even with JPG at quality 60 it shouldn't be _that_ bad.


I'm rather confused now though as to why they look so weird.

@Lightspeed

Do this artifacts show in-game as well?

[Lightspeed]

Of course.

As I have boosted the brightness slightly in-game (with the slider in the options screen) it's even worse (a lot) than it shows here.

When I saw planetD (as DDS) in-game I really felt I was going to vomit

[Flipside]

Well, I use the NVidia plugin as well, if you want, you can Email the file to me and I'll run it through mine on those settings and see what happens on a third computer?

[SA22C]

I think you're too picky Lightspeed.  The second image you posted doesn't look bad at all, at least here in the forum.