posted 04-19- 05:12 PM
OK, this may be a totally insane idea, but it seems to work for me, although I might just be imagining things. As a graphic artist/designer, one of the first things I noticed about the TIF files in SDOE was that they were 24-bit, 16 million color, true color files. In 99.99% of the projects I've done, 8-bit, 256 color, indexed color is entirely suitable and produces a much smaller file, so I thought this would apply to SDOE.Starting with the skins on my site, I always convert my working file down to indexed color before posting it. Carrying this idea through to terrain, I ran a batch conversion on the TIFs from the PAR files to convert them too. Alas, this had its problems as transparency does not work with an 8-bit color depth file (presumably the alpha channel is lost).
However, all is not lost. My suggestion would be to convert any files which do not need to be transparent in any way (now you know why I posted the request for for tree files recently!) to indexed color. I know that SDOE always runs in 16-bit high color, but the indexed color files are much smaller and therefore would theoretically load faster if nothing else. Beyond that, I can not see one iota of differnence between the game using the original files and using my indexed color files.
The tech people may tell me I'm insane and what I'm doing gets me no performance enhancement at all (please do if this is true!), but if it's not, I would suggest that all future in-game TIF files which do not need to be transparent in any way, be made indexed color.
I was about to upgrade my PC, then the pink slip came, so I'm forced to try and squeeze as much performance out of my humble 300MHz/12MB video card system as I can for the time being, including the potentially nutty idea above!
Any input (even to gun me down) would be welcome.
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Be seeing you,
3dp
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posted 04-19- 05:12 PM
posted 04-19- 09:16 PM
