[Topgun]

oh come on! how could you get rid of it? textures half the size with no noticeable artifacts!!!

[karajorma]

Use .dds

[Topgun]

dds has artifacts, 16bit palette does not.

[haloboy100]

what about decals? can we include decals in 3.6.10?

[DaBrain]

dds has artifacts, 16bit palette does not.

(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.

[Topgun]

dds has artifacts, 16bit palette does not.

(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

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.

[Kazan]

i can most certainly tell the difference between 16bit and 32bit color depth

dds>16bit tga

[DaBrain]

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

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.

[Woolie Wool]

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

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.

[Nuke]

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)

[Topgun]

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.

[Flipside]

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.

[Nuke]

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.

[Topgun]

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.

[Flipside]

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.

[Nuke]

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.

[Bobboau]

I use it a lot during development, it's a good temporary format.

[Nuke]

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.

[DaBrain]

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.

[Topgun]

what is faster? 16bit tga or u-8-8-8 dds?