posted 06-07- 11:13 PM               

This is just a few of the schemes I have. All the 512 schemes i've been sitting on for months can now be used!

posted 06-08- 12:56 AM               

The only problem is, you need to work a bit harder once the resolution goes up. You can see plenty of mapping problems in this, which I didn't worry about originally since the 256 x 256 version went nice and blurry

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Wings with Wires

posted 06-08- 07:35 AM               

quote:

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Originally posted by Yardstick:
If you guys start plying around with 1024x768 textures bear in mind the enormous demands you will be placing on video card memory. The only flight sim, that I am aware of, that uses textures this large is CFS2. However, CFS2 uses a proprietary bitmap compression which effectively limits the image to something close to 256 colours.

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Speaking of compression, does an app have to be written specifically to use the various cards compression features? Or does the card compress the images as they come in over the AGP?

If we can do the former (ie, leave them compressed in memory after loadup) that would certainly be a priority for the patch.

posted 06-08- 09:05 AM            

Werner

posted 06-08- 10:24 AM               

You know snick, when you get her to a good point send it to me so I can redo those radiators. then I can just port them to the F.

posted 06-08- 10:59 AM               

About the sizes, really we could have made the planes look this good the whole time right? All we had to do was use a bunch of 256x256 bitmaps? What was stopping us then? The vid card ram.

One good thing is (besides I'm sure its easier to paint like this instead of across a bunch of smaller squares) is that the 512 textures will be for people with smoking vid cards that have enough ram.

So will an old vid card auto down convert the bitmap so it works and doesn't take up as much ram?

Or are we going to need to plane packs, one for low end and one for high end?

posted 06-08- 11:10 AM            

An analogy - Model Ts came in any colour you wanted, so long as it was Black. Since then cars can "support" Black or "Other". Lets say black is less expensive (same as 256 schemes on your vid card), you can still drive that car on the same road (online) as some other guy with the same model who's got something other than black painted on his car.

Does that help?

Werner

posted 06-08- 11:24 AM               

This was one of many reasons why I've wanted 512 for so long. Now that we have it new planes can be on one tif and lower out glitchs we get when our tex mem goes to crap.

I know only a few could see the great new things but older planes can now have the detail of a two tif user made plane without remapping.

now, on to the cool stuff! Here's another pic of the ki-61 above but with more work done. Nice huh?

posted 06-08- 01:43 PM               

DXT doesn't convert to 256 colours, although it does use a form of colour space compression which degrades the image. The degradation gets worse with high constrast changes in an image.

Here's an example of the same picture using texture compression.

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Wings with Wires

Go here for info about the Unofficial Patch

posted 06-08- 03:13 PM               

quote:

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Originally posted by Bryan Russell:
Here's an example of the same picture using texture compression.

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I can't even see a difference - is there some sort of artifacting I should be noticing?

BTW, what's the memory savings when using this compression?

posted 06-08- 03:37 PM               

The DXT compression is fixed ratio, and it has three different types. The best compression is 8:1 for RGBA textures and 6:1 for RGB textures. Thats against 32bit though, so you could say 4:1 and 3:1 compared to 16 bit, which is what SDOE uses.

In real numbers thats a 16bit 1024x1024 texture compressed from about 2M to about 524k. For 512x512 its about 524k compressed to 131k, which out of interest is the same size as a 256x256 uncompressed texture.

Apperantly there is a driver bug for GeForces that make DXT texture compression look worse than it should be for OpenGL. I haven't applied the patch yet so the image above may have been improved a little with, or maybe not.

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Wings with Wires

posted 06-09- 07:02 AM            

If the texture compression is applied to our 256x256 used now then it must be true that nearly twice as many different types of planes can be used in an online game, which is an online Improvement. or at least the same amount of planes but curing the effect described below

One of the first noticable side effects of running out of texture memory with two many planes is not seen on the planes themselves
but when you come to fire your guns and get blockiness or you drop your bombs or your plane explodes for whatever reason and the explosion is blocky.

By this time you are well into a mission.

So having 512 will keep the limit. ie number of different planes online the same as now, and maybe the blockiness too will still be there! or it could just compress the explosions etc if they are in 256 to just within at the memory limit. who knows!

Is there any way to have a feature or do you know of a tool that can report on the amount of your physical texture memory that is behing used at any given time.

ie,, at the SDOE loadup screen after the textures load would be the ideal place to inform you of the graphics memory status.

Maybe this is a reason why some people crash ctd or some not.. they run out of memory ...just thinking out loud there

posted 06-09- 09:53 AM               

quote:

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Originally posted by Bryan Russell:
In real numbers thats a 16bit 1024x1024 texture compressed from about 2M to about 524k. For 512x512 its about 524k compressed to 131k, which out of interest is the same size as a 256x256 uncompressed texture.

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Damb, well that basically solves THAT!

Do I remember it correctly, that DTX the MS re-naming of the S3 stuff that came out a few years ago?

posted 06-09- 10:28 AM               

Ok that sovles that problem.

Bring on the 512s so I can try them out when I get a new card.

posted 06-09- 11:26 AM               

all the 512 planes I have I've changed myself and planes I currently have in the works. you know how to get the textures and you can use OPS to view the scheme in 512 but you need the latest patch and edit the SM file to see them in game.

Guys
I took a look at the par files last night and it looks like most if not all the SM files are in par 12. It looks like it would take me roughly 45 mins to convert all current released planes overto 512. The only problem at this point is should we release a patch for PP6.1 and bump it to 6.2? the patch would be around 30 megs and could be done one of two ways: place everything back in the par file, or put things in folders.

I know there is a few planes in another par file but this wouldn't be a problem to do to a few more planes.

After this is done this would mean ANY will be able to be painted at 512 or higher.

If you've ever wanted to know how the mossie, b17, lanc, spits, or your fav add-on plane looks in high res it could all happen really soon if you bare with us for a few more days to figure out what to do.

Now, You know how great the planes are right? This doesn't have to stop with the planes outside. Just think of the detail we can have in the cockpits with 512 textures!

just thought i'd throw that out there to get you thinking.

Bryan
Whats the ini line to get the compression since the GUI option is gone.

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Tony "Razer" Martin

Brought to you by the Campaign for a better Pacific.
FS Hangar

[This message has been edited by Razer (edited 06-09-2001).]

posted 06-09- 09:55 PM               

The way it is implemented, all textures loaded by the game are compressed and written to the texture cache, and then sent to the card compressed when thay are needed.

Ideally, there should probably be a texture flag to say whether a texture should be compressed or not, but it is tricky since it would possibly change the file format.

I have always wondered why some games require people to compress the file with DXT, rather than let the game do it. OpenGL does it very easily, and lets you get at the compressed image so it can be saved to the cache etc, and I bet with zip style compression etc on the actual file, there is probably very little differene in physical file size (in fact its probably smaller with zip etc for some images). Just overcomplicates things IMO.

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Wings with Wires

Go here for info about the Unofficial Patch