32/24 bit art for allegiance

madpeople · Post by **madpeople** » Thu Apr 05, 2007 1:22 pm

oh right, that makes everything much simpler then /laugh.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":lol:" border="0" alt="laugh.gif" />

adding correct alpha levels wouldn't have been too hard if someone were to tell me the rules for adding them.

weedman has provided me with some additional files, the list of missing files has been updated

mesial · Post by **mesial** » Thu Apr 05, 2007 1:55 pm

Madpeople, I have uploaded a zip file to your area on my site. It containes the BMP files A thru G.

http://www.mesialonline.com/madpeople/AthruG.zip

mesial · Post by **mesial** » Thu Apr 05, 2007 2:13 pm

H thru L has been added too.

http://www.mesialonline.com/madpeople/HthruL.zip

mesial · Post by **mesial** » Thu Apr 05, 2007 2:31 pm

Note: All files were converted with MDL Converter

Orion · Post by **Orion** » Thu Apr 05, 2007 2:56 pm

KGJV wrote:QUOTE (KGJV @ Apr 5 2007, 07:55 AM) Orion I think you're confusing 2 things.

We're in the Artwork forum not the dev forum.

It's all about art and the format must be widely supported by the tools artists use.

Files size could be relevant for sharing time between artists and dev team, so lossless compression is a plus but not mandatory.

Now concerning DDS, it's now mainly used on 'build' side and that's code side not art side. Artists shouldnt use it anymore directly because they dont need to, there are tools to generate this format IF needed.

DDS only advantage is for textures, cube maps and mipmap levels WITH compression when there are memory issues on the video card (providing the card supports DXTn texture compression) AND if there is few available cpu time for preprocessing ressources.

As of today, Alleg only use textures, no cube maps or mipmap and current engine cant deal with DXTn texture compression.

I'd never ask an artist to work with the DDS format. Why would he bother with this?

If we eventually upgrade the engine to use compressed textures, mips, maps and other goodies then we'll probably perform either "build time operations" on the artwork to preprocess things (so here eventually we could use DDS) or "runtime operations" (cpu only) when loading bitmaps.

So it's not my call but I wouldnt recommend the DDS format, it adds complexity where it's not needed.

It doesn't add complexity because it should be supported already - meeple said "all the formats in the DX9 sdk will be supported natively," This isn't OpenGL, you dont need to add extra support. And we're not talking about 'artists' here, we're talking about madpeople. DDS is supported in the latest Photoshops w/o any plugins, and the older photoshops there is plugin on the nvidia website.

I'm not saying that DDS should be used 'between artists', but in the final product in the artwork directory. Not that that is even an issue in this case, as it's just going to be someone (madpeople it looks like) going through and converting a bunch of textures. And yes, I believe Allegiance does support mipmapping, because it's a video card feature, and Allegiance uses DP calls still, they are supported in T&L (which Allegiance uses).

madpeople · Post by **madpeople** » Thu Apr 05, 2007 3:16 pm

nvm, ninja posts

hmm, renaming the GT textures was a pain. missing list updated...

KiteGeek · Post by **KiteGeek** » Thu Apr 05, 2007 9:57 pm

Hi all, I posted a in the process image of the new Home One Cap Ship for SW.... A question about the 24 to 32 but images.

Will people like me be able to use these on our older machines? 600mhz, Pent 3, ATI 16mb graphics card, and 328 ram... O,o

Also when I save the textures I use Gimp and an not sure how to make them 24 or 32 bit... I will look into that, but should I save in both 24 and 32, in case I will need to keep using the 24bit version. I would like others that can use 32 to have that option to have it. /smile.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":)" border="0" alt="smile.gif" />

Kite

asheron2k · Post by **asheron2k** » Fri Apr 06, 2007 12:20 am

Hey just threw together a quick program to convert bmps into 32 bit
rapidshare...sorry in advance
It simply takes filenames as arguments and converts them all(overwrites the originals so only use it on copies)
effectively it works with dragging a file or group of files onto the exe

Dogbones · Post by **Dogbones** » Fri Apr 06, 2007 2:38 am

Sounds like madpeople is the defacto point man on this.

Once you've got them all in 32 bit, convert them all to png and ftp them to
fazdev.alleg.net stick them in the artwork folder.

We just need them as .png (not the png equiv of bmp.mdl, which would be png.mdl I guess)

This might eventually make it into the 'code' repository (SVN at the moment) but I'm not too keen on that unless we stick them in their own, completely separate project.

Dog

Adaven · Post by **Adaven** » Fri Apr 06, 2007 7:20 am

Kite, yes there will be a performance hit, 32 bit textures I think will take twice the space as 16bit. You might still be able to get away with those specs if you don't try to bump the texture resolution up much. Resolution is going to be the more limiting factor, as our goal of 2048^2 textures is 64x larger than the current 256^2's.

Keep in mind though that all of these things will be optional (not sure about the color), so you will still have the same allegiance you've always had. And you also don't have to go all or nothing, you can use just the upgraded textures you want to, down to individual ships. We can also make low, med and high quality versions of everything so that if you want to spend the time you can tailor the quality to exactly match whatever resources you have.