Hard Light Productions Forums
Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => FS2 Open Coding - The Source Code Project (SCP) => Topic started by: Topgun on July 10, 2007, 11:24:36 am
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oh come on! how could you get rid of it? textures half the size with no noticeable artifacts!!!
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Use .dds
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dds has artifacts, 16bit palette does not.
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what about decals? can we include decals in 3.6.10?
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dds has artifacts, 16bit palette does not.
(http://i9.tinypic.com/6czfds0.png)
(200% size)
I prefer the DDS one. It has compression artifacts, yeah.
But it has mipmaps and takes up even less memory than the 16-bit TGA.
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dds has artifacts, 16bit palette does not.
(http://i9.tinypic.com/6czfds0.png)
(200% size)
I prefer the DDS one. It has compression artifacts, yeah.
But it has mipmaps and takes up even less memory than the 16-bit TGA.
uh uh. my guess is your indexing the palette on a 8 bit scale, not 16bit. you just can't notice the difference between 24bit and 16bit :nod:
if you can play A WHOLE LEVEL with the same 16bit palette and barely notice the difference, then I am pretty you can't on a singel texture.
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i can most certainly tell the difference between 16bit and 32bit color depth
dds>16bit tga
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uh uh. my guess is your indexing the palette on a 8 bit scale, not 16bit. you just can't notice the difference between 24bit and 16bit :nod:
if you can play A WHOLE LEVEL with the same 16bit palette and barely notice the difference, then I am pretty you can't on a singel texture.
Uhm nope... this is the one with indexed colors.
(http://i18.tinypic.com/4r8hh6r.jpg)
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uh uh. my guess is your indexing the palette on a 8 bit scale, not 16bit. you just can't notice the difference between 24bit and 16bit :nod:
if you can play A WHOLE LEVEL with the same 16bit palette and barely notice the difference, then I am pretty you can't on a singel texture.
Incorrect. The human eye can discern around 1.5 million colors. 16-bit color has 65,536, and 24-bit has 16.7 million. Really, 24-bit is all you will ever need, but 16-bit is noticeably inferior to 24-bit.
Also, for all this time I was wondering why the effects seemed to have taken a drop in quality. Now I know why. I think we should eventually go back to TGA for effects once older machines with 512MB and 256MB RAM are discarded, while keeping DDS for ship textures. DDS artifacts are virtually undetectable on textures, but highly noticeable on effects because of the gradients.
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sure dds has artifacts, but theyre so small that instead of just using tgs you could simply double the resolution of your texture making dds the format for the distant future (at least untill they come up with a hardware compatible lossless texture format)
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if you can play A WHOLE LEVEL with the same 16bit palette and barely notice the difference, then I am pretty you can't on a singel texture.
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I don't have particuarly good eyesight, and I can see the difference between 16-Bit colour and 24-Bit quite easily.
Frankly, reverting back to a 16-Bit colour format texture would be a step backwards for the SCP, there's no good reason to do it, to be honest, you already have a vast choice of formats to use for graphics compared to most games, if anything, the SCP team are looking at optimizing the code for textures, not adding to it.
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i dont really see the need for anything other than dds and tga (pcx for legacy use). its acceptable for 32bit tgas to be used for low resolution effects bitmaps, like small particles. dds sucks for images smaller than 512^2. thought often its less costly to up your effect size than to use tga. when dealing with 32bit (with alpha), dds gives you a texture a quarter of the size the tga equivelant. so you could use a 512^2 dds instead of a 128^2 tga. though on most video cards such images have a rather negligable impact on memory usage and the artifact free alpha of tga tends to look better.
the other reason tga needs to be kept around is for normal maps, which have zero tolerance for artifacts. dds has normal map formats available, but ive never really made any compairisons.
formats like jpeg, png, bmp, ect really could be canned and i wouldnt care much.
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i dont really see the need for anything other than dds and tga (pcx for legacy use). its acceptable for 32bit tgas to be used for low resolution effects bitmaps, like small particles. dds sucks for images smaller than 512^2.
that is why I want it back.
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From experience, most of the artifact problems in .dds are to do with it trying to compress the transparency data in a lossy way, I have very little problem with ship-textures etc.
16-Bit .tga does not allow a transparency layer, if memory serves me correct, Freespace 2 now uses the Alpha-map (Transparency layer on .tga and .dds files - hence 32-Bit .tga with 24-Bit colour) instead of simple additive rendering (Black = Transparent). So, the only thing that the 16-Bit .tga files could be used for are ship textures.
Edit: And that's not mentioning the visual differences. and the fact that most Video cards have a good chunk of texture memory, which should, theoretically be plenty for a single mission.
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i usually just use 512^2 or greater sized dds files to avoid artifacts, they're still there but they get overwhelmed by detail at those resolutions. but when you do a tiny partical which will at any time take up no more than 20 pixels on your screen. 24 or 32 bit tga is ideal. then again you can still use dds 8:8:8 or 8:8:8:8 and get the same results (i shouldnt have said dds sucks for low res, but rather dxt formats suck for low res). tga is a good format though and even if noone uses it it would be a shame to get rid of support for it.
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I use it a lot during development, it's a good temporary format.
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that too. you dont want to compress to dds untill you know for sure youre textures are done. repeditively opening, editing, saving of compressed images will just eat their quality.
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I used to use TGA for testing too. (24-Bit), but now I've switched to uncompressed DDS.
No long compression time, but you still got mipmaps. ;)
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what is faster? 16bit tga or u-8-8-8 dds?
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dds has artifacts, 16bit palette does not.
(http://i9.tinypic.com/6czfds0.png)
(200% size)
I prefer the DDS one. It has compression artifacts, yeah.
But it has mipmaps and takes up even less memory than the 16-bit TGA.
Why can't we stick with 24bit stuff? 16bit was necessary back in the days of the voodoo3 and tnt2 when 32 bit was too slow to play in. Today 32/24 bit (it's the same thing except in 24 bit you don't have 8 layers of transparencies) is no longer a concern of speed. In fact todays cards since the first radeon came out perform better in 32 bit than 16. And what is with the 24 bit dds sucking ass? The 24 bit dds looks just like the 16 bit tga. Who sharted here? I don't see any benefit moving on up to 24 bit from 16 bit if you're going to make it look the same. Sure dds may have less memory usage and mip maps, but the 24bit tga up here is the only good looking thing, while the 24 bit dds is merely a clone of the 16 bit tga. If you're going to use 16.7 million colors next time for a 16.7 million color texture, make sure to use more than just 65, 536 of the 16.7 million. I mean this is horrible.
And if you want to see a difference in 16 bit and 32 bit, go play half life 1 and compare it to playing half life 2 color palettely speaking. Or compare quake 2 to quake 4. You're sure to see a difference on the 16 bit only games and their 32 bit only successors (hl1 and q2 have significant color banding while hl2 and q4 do not as they have good 32 bit measures taken).
EDIT: Sorry, the 24 bit dds does have slightly better color blending than the 16 bit tga, but the 24 bit dds look largely identical to the 16 bit tga anyway.
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All modern games use compressed textures.
First, you can't make a game without mipmaps anymore. Really... you can't do that.
Ok, you don't really need DDS for that, but imho, it's the best way to handle them.
And if you use compressed maps, you can use the saved memory for high-res maps.
A 2048² DXT1 compressed map looks better than a 1024² uncompressed map. Or at least it can possibly look way better if the artist does a good job.
You should also realize that the next Media VP version will take up around 1 GB. (with the VP compression). And the biggest part are the textures and effects.
Now imagine we get normal mapping support. Those maps will add a considerable ammount of stuff for the gfx memory.
Sometimes you have to use uncompressed 24-bit maps. Mostly for some effects (not the animated ones).
16-Bit textures are not useful anymore though.
Look at the sample picture. The color banding in the16-bit effect is horrible.
Sure, the DDS one looks a bit grainy, but at least it can handle pretty much all colors and you don't have to worry about color palettes.
Imho the DDS one looks better. Especially because something will be behind it in the game.
A ship... a nebula, or an explosion. It will cover the grainy look.
The colorbanding can get even worse with something in the background.
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The software used to create the DDS also has large effect on the amount and visibility of artifacts. Older like DDS converter do not really do that good job in it. Using somethinga tad better like nvdxt (command line utility) helps.
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Final note:
Use DDS. Even though you may prefer TGA, and it is easier to develop with use DDS for the final product.
- It's more efficient since videocards natively support it.
- DDS generates mipmaps - that's NEEDED
- If you're hung up on artifacts, you can USE UNCOMPRESSED DDS
This has all been said before, the coders are just rehearsing the same.
Bobbau also often rants (and rightly so), that you can't aim for perfection with each and every single effect/model. You have to make compromises. This is a game, if each and every effect eats up tens of Mbytes the memory requirement will knock down the roof.